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ROMANISM 



THE 



DANGER AHEAD. 



The Reason Why a Good Roman Catholic 

Cannot be a Good Citizen of 

this Republic. 






By A. J. GEOYEE. 




Chicago : 

Craig & Barlow, 180 & 182 Monroe Street. 

1887. 



The I,ibrar' 

°P COKTGRBSS 



n* 



v>^ 



tf^ 



Copyright, 

1887, 

By A. J. Grover. 



ROMANISM. 39 

point. I would ask why does this great power with 
so much zeal and so universally, continue the fraud 
and swindle of the confessional, and enforce it with 
so much severity if it is not in fact important ? If 
it is not to be made possibly available in certain 
contingencies not unlikely to arise in the near future, 
viz.: revolution? 

Is it only important as a source of revenue ? 
It constantly sw T ells the vast revenues of the church 
as the little drops of rain aggregate the mighty 
flood, but it is also vastly important as a secret, 
prompt, convenient and inexpensive means of finding 
out Protestant and infidel secrets all over the world, 
and especially in the United States. In case of 
sudden conflict, or general rising, or revolution, on 
any point between 'Eomanism and the civil authorities 
this secret spy system would become vastly more 
important than in ordinary times. 

It is constantly a cardinal and important point 
with Eomanists to guard the line of division between 
Eomanism and the progressive classes. No inter- 
marriages of its communicants w r ith outsiders, is one 
rule by which the fold of the faithful is guarded. 
Absolute jurisdiction of the priest in marriage and 
divorce, denunciation of every Protestant marriage 
as adultery, and absolute ignoring of the civil law in 
marriage, is a cardinal principle of Eomanism. The 
spy system of the confessional is important to enable 
priests' practically to preserve this exclusive jurisdic- 
tion over marriage. The cradle, the marriage, and 
the grave, are the strategic points of ecclesiastical 
power. The secret spy system of the confessional 



40 ROMANISM. 

constitutes a picket guard all along the lines, by 
which all heretics, dissenters and deserters can be 
detected, arrested and brought back. No mixing up, 
no breaking ranks, no blurring the line of demarka- 
tion ! For by such processes the progressive tenden- 
cies of the age would slowly fritter away the power 
and decimate the ranks of the enslaved victims of 
Eomari avarice and power. 

Meantime Protestantism sleeps the sleep of 
death ; and chink, chink, goes the small change from 
two hundred million Eomanists into the bottomless 
and irresponsible treasury vaults of the Vatican. 
Chink, chink, chink, go the twenty-five cent pieces 
from a million servant girls in this country, and large 
and small change from all other classes of victims 
that are dragged to the confessional by the sordid 
and tyrannical chains of Eomanism, every week in 
the year and every year of their lives, and the vast 
resources of the pope are swelled beyond calculation, 
with which to build marble cathedrals, costly altars 
and pay for $10,000 robes for cardinals, as well 
as to fee and feed sumptuously an army of glut- 
tonous, wine-bibbing, passion-swollen priests all over 
this and other countries. And still more, and saddest 
of all, those who are made to contribute, as a rule, 
work like slaves, live on the scantiest and poorest 
food, wear the cheapest clothing, are sheltered in the 
meanest huts, often without floor or windows, and 
dense ignorance has supreme control of brain and 
soul. The more ignorance, the stronger the church. 

I believe every well-informed man and woman 
will agree with me when I say that every dollar 



ROMANISM. 41 

•obtained by the confessional, every dollar obtained 
for indulgences, every dollar obtained for extreme 
unction, every dollar obtained for baptism with "holy 
water," every dollar obtained for "dispensing from 
promissory oaths, " every dollar obtained for "absolu- 
tions from sin, " every dollar obtained for performing 
masses for souls in purgatory, is obtained by false, 
fraudulent and wicked pretenses ; by exactly what the 
statutes of every State denominate "swindling/ ' "con- 
fidence games, " "fraudulent pretenses," "cheating," 
"black-mail" and the like. If purgatory is a fiction, 
and a priest makes his victim believe in its real exist- 
ence ; that the soul of his friend or relative is detained 
there ; that masses and prayers will help him out ; 
and thereby induces his victim to pay money for 
masses and prayers, why is not the whole business a 
system of blackmail? 

I believe that every well-informed, honest man 
and woman will agree with me that those who com- 
mit these statutory crimes, be they called priests, 
"bishops, cardinals, popes, confidence operators, necro- 
toancers, mediums, or what not, ought to be indicted 
und punished under the statute in such case made 
•tind provided. 

The entire system of popery is a huge swindle 
of the ignorant victims who are born or drawn into 
its unholy influence, and robbed of their money by 
Us trickery. 

Every priest, bishop, cardinal and pope knows 
full well that every one of the pretenses and practices 
above enumerated are most false and fraudulent. 
Nobody knows that they are fraudulent better than 



42 ROMANISM. 

those who get their living by practice of them. To 
conclude that they do not know this is imbecility, not 
charity. They know that they do not do, and cannot 
do, what they pretend to do, and receive money from 
the poor and ignorant for doing. They know that 
their pretended processes of "absolution from sin," 
"extreme unction," baptism and the like are silly 
falsehoods and frauds. They know full well, when 
they receive money for any such performance, that 
they render no equivalent whatever, to their ignorant, 
duped and deceived victims. 

They know that they lie when they teach that 
the "sacrifice of the mass remits sin;" or helps a 
soul in purgatory ; or that water with a little salt in 
it is "holy water;" or that greasing a man about to> 
die, helps his soul. 

And yet, they cheat, confidence, and defraud the 
ignorant poor and ignorant rich out of their money 
by these performances in plain violation of the law 
against common cheats, and obtaining money by false 
pretenses, in all the states. 

Says the authority from which I have already 
quoted and from which I shall continue to quote : 
"The priests are made judges of the sin, also of the 
disposition of the sinner. If they consider him worthy 
of pardon they absolve him and their absolution is 
just as efficacious as would be that of Jesus Christ 
whose place they fill." Abridged Coarse of Eeligious 
Instruction, etc., Page 223. This is blasphemously 
putting the priest in the place of the Almighty — in 
the view of all Protestants — usurping the prerogative 
of God himself, according to orthodox theology — a 



PREFACE. 



wfc* 



THE following pages were written and pub- 
lished under a profound conviction that 
Romanism is the insidious enemy of liberty, 
and most serious menace to the republic. The 
free school system is in danger. Romanism 
has votes to be cast as a unit. These votes 
are necessary in national elections, and in 
most local elections, to party success^; which- 
ever party will promise to do most for Roman- 
ism, will get them. Here lies the danger. 
Politicians have already silenced or subsidized 
the Protestant pulpit and the partisan press. 
As in the days when slavery ruled, everybody 
interested in the success of a party caters to 
Romanism. The national policy as to slavery 
almost cost the life of the republic. There is 
ten times the danger to our free institutions 
from Romanism now, that there was from 
slavery in 1851. 

If this pamphlet shall have the effect, in any 
degree, to call public attention to this most 
important subject, and awaken the public mind 
from apathetic unconcern, the object of the 
author will be accomplished. A. J. G. 

March, 1887. 



ROMANISM. 



"If ever the liberty of the American Republic is 
destroyed it will be the work of Roman Catholic priest*." 
— Lafayette. 

Eecently there was held in Eome a council of 
American bishops ; previously a high official, Mon- 
eignior Capel, had shrewdly drawn out a pretty full 
newspaper expression of public sentiment in this 
country on the question between Eomanism and the 
friends of our public school system, and without 
doubt had made his report thereof to the pope ; then 
came the pope's bull against free schoo]s, free 
masonry, free government, free society, free 
thought and free men — in short, against the spirit 
of the age — the fourteenth century's protest against 
the nineteenth — the cry of superstition against nat- 
ure — "the pope's bull against the comet." 

This ecclesiastical pronunciamento, however, 
has made every priest and bishop of the Eomish 
church in this Eepublic, an active opponent of our 
free schools, and opened up for debate the whole 
question between the progressive tendencies of the 
present, as represented by Eepublicanism, and the 
spirit of the past, as represented by Eomanism. In 
this papal bull everything good is claimed for the 
Eomish church, and everything bad is found in that 
which is opposed to it. The pope claims for himself 



6 



ROMANISM. 



" Catholicism," and "Catholicity," — a claim as im- 
pudent and absurd as it is false. 

The truth is, and it cannot be repeated too often 
or too vigorously, that the Eoman church now, as in 
all the past, is a narrow, selfish, wicked, cruel, heart- 
less, unmitigated despotism. Its aims and ita 
measures, as a rule, have been satanic. It has main- 
tained itself through all the long centuries of its 
unholy existence by the most indefensible instrumen- 
talities. It is propagating itself in this country at 
the present time by fraud. It pretends to be what 
it is not. Its revenues are obtained by false pretenses ; 
the conceited imbecile and tyrant who now represents 
it in Eome, is pleased to denounce all secret societies ; 
but he and the ecclesiastical depotism which he repre- 
sents could not live a single year in the open light 
of day. Eomanism has always maintained itself by 
its secret conclaves, Jesuitical organizations, and 
infamous secret conspiracies against the liberties of 
mankind. In every feature and purpose, it is a con- 
spiracy against the freedom of man — an essentially 
secret organization, wide-spread, plotting in the dark 
to seize the earnings and blot out the intelligence of 
mankind. Except its necessarily and unavoidably 
open machinery by which the small change of the 
poor, the Peter's pence, are transferred to its coffers, 
the Eoman church has been a huge secret organiza- 
tion, dark and underground, dealing in gross and 
baleful superstitions, which have been a death-damp 
to the human mind, and to human progress. 

Its meetings and councils of cardinals and 
bishops have always been in secret ; its discussions of 



ROMANISM. 7 

its measures of propagandism have been secret \ its 
use of its vast revenues and the amount thereof have 
always been secret. It has never rendered any ac- 
count, and never will, to those who pay its revenues. 
Its societies of Jesus, Jesuits — (a most blasphemous 
usurpation and use of his name) convents and nun- 
neries have always been secret organizations guarded 
by sentinels and from which the public are carefully 
excluded and from which a victim seldom escapes. It 
has always administered secret and abominably 
wicked oaths to the officials of these societies and to 
its regular ecclesiastics from bishop up if not down. 
These oaths render all other obligations void at the 
option of the church officials. It issues secret orders 
as well as public bulls, and not unfrequently in the 
past these secret orders have been for plunder, mur- 
der and assassination, in the name of God. For 
instance, when it ordered its pliant and oath-bound 
mitred and surpliced assassins to kill, in a single 
night, more than sixty thousand French Huguenot 
heretics — Protestants. 

The machinery of the inquisition was mostly 
secret, even its trials and often its executions. By 
this machinery many thousand " heretics/ ' that is, 
the best men and women, were murdered. And all 
this to keep the light of intelligence from the masses — 
the only way to preserve this infamously wicked 
thing miscalled the Church of God. 

So far as it could it has always kept the Bible 
a secret, sealed, and forbidden book, lest the people 
should read it and learn to think. It has kept, so far 
as it could, all science and all literature locked up in 



8 ROMANISM. 

its cloisters away from the people and under the 
exclusive control of its ecclesiastics. Its priests mum- 
ble Latin prayers and rituals to the end that the 
ignorant masses may wonder, believe and not under- 
stand. Lest children may become educated, it seeks 
to destroy free schools in this country wherever it 
can and threatens revolution through its agent Capel 
if we persist in maintaining them ; and this threat is 
emphasized in the pope's bull. Tlje late encyclical 
is indeed a denunciation, not only of the free school 
system and free masonry, but republican government, 
the principles of the Declaration of Independence 
and Christianity itself, which its author, the pope, 
most falsely and absurdly claims to teach. All these 
statements I shall expect fully to prove before I get 
through with this essay. 

The Eoman church, falsely pretending that it 
can and does understand the secrets of God and 
heaven and hell ; and blasphemously assuming that it 
can control the destinies of men, to save eternally or 
damn forever in a life to come, undertakes to bestow 
for money the joys of the former, and inflict the 
pains of the latter on those who refuse credulity and 
cash. To make this infamous and fraudulent trade 
in heaven and hell in the next life prosperous and 
universal, the Eoman church has found it necessary, 
so far as it could, to destroy all intelligence but that 
of its officials, all sovereignties but that of the pon- 
tiff, and all secret organizations, but its own, in this 
world. Pope after pope has bulled his ecclesiastical 
thunder against all secret societies, ever since they 
began to be organized outside and for other purposes 



ROMANISM. 9 

than Eoman propagandism. But governments and 
societies have been gradually shaking off the Eoman 
power, as the masses, in spite of that power, have 
learned to think, to speak, and to act for themselves. 
This is a fact upon which civilization may congratu- 
late itself and base its hopes for the future. It may 
congratulate itself that free masonry antagonizes 
popery; that the unscrupulous head of that hoary 
despotism has now made the issue and thrown down 
the gauntlet, not only to masonry, but to free schools, 
free government and civilization itself. The writer 
does not undertake to espouse or defend masonry, 
but only to say that it is most fortunate that it is an 
enemy to Romanism, and the friend of free schools 
and republican government. Masonry is as widely 
organized as popery, and approximately as powerful. 
It may yet become the forlorn hope of civilization. 
As between the two, masonry is infinitely to be pre- 
ferred, the Protestant enemies of masonry to the con- 
trary notwithstanding. Masonry is at least democratic. 
It claims to be beneficent ; popery is as secret as 
masonry and is an unmitigated despotism. Masonry 
is helpful to its members ; popery is a curse to its 
subjects. Masonry is a brotherhood; popery is a 
heart of stone and a hand of iron remorselessly 
clutching the brain, the liberty and the bread of 
mankind; masonry represents the spirit of the pres- 
ent age, slowly tending to co-operation ; popery repre- 
sents the savage and tyrannical spirit of the remote 
past, tending to universal antagonism and enslave- 
ment of the masses to a few self-constituted sham 
infallibles. Masonry loves science; popery loves 



10 ROMANISM. 

superstition. Masonry was born of brotherly love; 
popery was born of diabolical hate and lust of power. 
Masonry is organized beneficence ; popery is organ- 
ized selfishness, falsehood, rapacity, and tyranny. 

Lord Macaulay, Voltaire, and others have tried 
to account for the survival of popery through all 
these ages. It survives because the cunning, the 
selfish and the devilish, the disposition to prey upon 
each other in human nature, surviye and must find 
expression. 

It perpetuates itself by means of its long experi- 
ence and consummate skill in organizing the ignorance 
of the world and adapting superstitions and terrors 
to the imaginations of those who cannot and dare 
not think. 

It is enabled to do this by means of secret and 
enormous wealth, drawn from its ignorant and help- 
less victims, and the secret as well as open devices 
of its trained intellects. 

It uses money, mendacity and pretended miracles 
to capture and enslave the ignorant. It assails every- 
thing tending to enlighten the masses, on whose 
ignorance it feeds. It is a universal cormorant* 
devouring the gains by enslaving the brains of man- 
kind. This is the secret of its power and of its per- 
petuation. There can be no other. 

But the terrible fact remains that the Eoman 
power has planted itself by the means enumerated, 
by the wealth and by the efforts of its secret Jesuit 
agents and organizations, more or less securely and 
extensively in every country on the globe. Its 
accumulated and accumulating cash, sucked by 



ROMANISM.. 11 

innumerable siphons of superstition and pretended 
miracle from the earnings of the ignorant into its 
secret and irresponsible treasury, has enabled it to 
propagate and spread itself along the path of civili- 
zation like a deadly pestilence. Indeed it has often 
anticipated civilization and pre-occupied the ground, 
seizing the hand and brain of labor and using them 
for its own agrandizement long before civilization had 
vitalized them and made them strong and independent. 
It has throttled civilization at a certain stage, when- 
ever it has had the power, and by its fatal grip and 
sting and poison rendered nations and people poor, 
degraded and idiotic. Italy, Spain, Ireland, Mexico, 
Lower Canada, sufficiently illustrate its perfect work. 
The people of Spain, held in the clutches of 
Eome for fifteen centuries, have become so poor, 
ignorant and ill fed, that the pestilence feeds and 
fattens on their lives as nowhere else on the globe. 
Human vitality and intelligence have probably been 
brought to a lower point in Spain than in any other 
civilized nation on the globe, and the Eoman church 
is largely, if not solely, responsible for this national 
degradation and ruin. At this moment it is reaping 
a rich but ghastly harvest, from the sale of absolu- 
tions, extreme unctions and masses to the degraded 
and dying people of Spain. It has filled its treasury 
by calamities of starvation, if not of plague, many 
times in Ireland. Superstition is never so potent as 
when terror and pain take possession of the ignorant* 
Ireland would have been free long ago but for the 
taxation which by means of superstition Eome has 
perpetually levied on the Irish people. It never wilL 



12 ROMANISM. 

be free until advancing intelligence shall refuse longer 
to submit to such taxation. 

It seeks to do, is most successfully preparing to 
do, is doing slowly, for the United States, what it has 
done for these nations. It will fully accomplish its 
purpose unless its progress shall be arrested by the 
very instrumentalities which the encyclical denounces, 
viz : free schools, free thought, free government, and 
free men. 

But it has planted itself here, has firm root, and 
is growing with fearful rapidity upon imported and 
native-born ignorance and the subsidized aids, politi- 
cal and educational, which its hoarded millions and 
the exigencies of political parties and unscrupulous 
demagogue politicians, enable it to procure. It is 
organizing, organizing, organizing in every village, 
hamlet and city in the United States and Territories. 
It has its cardinal* in New York city, clad in the 
blood -red regalia of the Vatican. This cardinal is 
well nigh the supreme dictator politically of our 
largest city, and indirectly of many smaller cities 
and towns. The pope himself, at length about to be 
driven from Italy, and perhaps from the Old World — 
so long cursed by his presence and the presence of 
his predecessors — has, we are told, serious thoughts 
of setting up the dynasty of his tyrannical unjioliness 
in this country. With the ratio of increase of 
Romanism before the war, it will take only forty- 

* McCloskey, since died. Gibbons of Baltimore appointed 
to the vacancy, and inaugurated with greater pomp and dis- 
play than any crowned monarch of Europe in a half a 
century. 



ROMANISM. 13 

seven years for this ecclesiastical despotism to handi- 
cap and cripple free government on this continent. 
With such a prospect in view in the near future, why 
should it not be desirable to his unholiness to come 
here and set up this old dynasty of the devil in this 
country, and make an Italy or a Spain of it ; spread 
Lower Canada and Mexico toward each other until 
they meet and clasp hands in the rich valleys of the 
Mississippi and Missouri ? 

Our free schools hampered and destroyed, the 
tide of papal ignorance from the Old World not only 
kept up but geometrically increased, the accumulated 
treasures of the Vatican poured out to buy our 
demagogue politicians, and this terrible consummation 
needs only time. The work is well begun. No man 
thinks of becoming a candidate for office in any large 
city, or for the presidency, until his friends assure 
the cardinal, archbishop and bishops of Eome that 
he is about as good as a Eomanist, or that his son 
has become a Jesuit agent, or victim, or communi- 
cant of this so-called church. When all candidates 
for the presidency are compelled to cater to Eome 
for votes, the fugitive fleeing from Eome and the 
Vatican may well be tempted to seek a home in New 
York. In the last campaign, Mr. Blaine's confidence 
in his election evidently came from an assurance that 
he would get the Eoman Catholic vote. Eev. Mr. 
Burchard's indiscretion at the fatal dinner cost Mr. 
Blaine the presidency. Eomanism destroys political 
integrity and corrupts parties ; it already holds the 
balance of power at the polls. The pledge to Mr^ 



±4 ROMANISM. 

Elaine in 1884, will be fully redeemed in 1888. What 
service will Mr. Blaine render to Eome ? 

Can our free schools yet undestroyed save us ? 
Can free masonry, which still flourishes, save us? 
Can our dying, almost lifeless Protestantism now 
save us ? Will the purchased demagogues all anxious 
for Boman votes, who administer the government, 
save us ? Will all these united save us ? This is 
the problem civilization is now called to meet and 
solve. The insolent encyclical, promulgated in the 
fullness of fanaticism and conscious power, against 
all that is valuable in our institutions, boldly chal- 
lenges the issue. It is defiant. Will the people of 
this country meet the issue thus boldly presented ? 
It certainly has not been made too soon for the inter- 
ests of the Eepublic. Will Protestantism cower and 
sneak and apologize and fellowship the monster that 
advances upon it, as it did to slavery a few years ago, 
ot will it be kicked into resentment and hurl back 
defiance and boldly expose the true character of 
Eoman pretensions as did Luther ? Will free schools 
succumb ? Will masonry surrender ? Will free gov- 
ernment be betrayed ? These questions come to us 
emphasized by the warning voice of fifteen centuries 
of Old World humanity cursed, degraded, devoured. 
Will we heed them ? The writer has been both puz- 
zled and amazed that as yet (so far as he is advised) 
no Protestant pulpit and no Protestant church 
organization has uttered one word in reply to the 
encyclical, defiant and insulting as it is. 

If true, the charges here made against Eoman- 
ism would seem sufficiently startling to arrest the 






ROMANISM. 15 

earnest attention of the American people. But if 
the indictment is startling, what must the proof to 
sustain it be ? Other counts not contained in this 
indictment might well be added, which will be even 
more startling still. 

For instance, the oath of allegiance, by which 
the thousands of Eomanists have obtained the rights 
of the ballot, citizenship and office, which if regarded 
as obligatory, would bind every one of them to sup- 
port the principles of republican government, is not 
worth to the Eomanists the p^per on which it is 
written. For whenever the Koman officials shall see 
fit to require this oath to be disregarded, every good 
Eomanist to a man is bound by his allegiance to the 
pope, which he believes more binding than his oath 
of allegiance to this government, to disregard it. 
Here is the proof. I quote from a high authority in 
the Eoman church, viz : 

Abbidged Course of Religious Instruction, Apologetic, Dogmatic, 

and Moral ; For the use of Catholic Colleges and Schools. By the 

Rev. Father F. X. Schouppe, of the Society of Jesus. Translated 

from the French Third Edition. New Edition thoroughly revised with 

the imprimatur of H. E. Cardinal Manning. London: Burns and 

Oates, 1880. 

The church, by virtue of the power of binding and 

loosing which she has received from Jesus Christ, (what a 

lie!) may for just reason dispense from vows or commute to 

other good works. She can also dispense from a promissory 

oath. This power belongs to the pope and the bishops, who 

exercise it either themselves or by their delegates. Page 

293. 

nationalism, or rather atheism of the state, consists in 
the exclusion from the civil government of all religious 
influence; above all that of the true religion of the church of 
Jesus Christ. Or, in other words, the separation of the state 
from the church; absolute independence of the state with 
regard to the church, which means the oppression of the 
church by the state. Pages 97 and 98. 



16 ROMANISM. 

The universal legislative power for the whole of 
Christendom belongs to the pope and to the bishops 
in their respective dioceses, and to the councils or 
assemblies of bishops for the entire church, or that 
part of the church which they represent. 

" The civil laws (of Christendom) are binding in conscience 
so long as they are conformable * * to the rights of the Catholic 
church." Page 278. Human laws are susceptible of dispensation. 
The power to dispense belongs to the sovereign pontiff." Page 
279. The italics are mine. 

One of the fundamental principles of our 
constitution is the absolute separation of church 
and state. Ours is a secular, not a religious govern- 
ment. In a country of many religions, no religion 
can be specially recognized or fostered by the state. 
Eeligious liberty could not exist if the state should 
attempt to enforce or favor any particular creed. 
This was the doctrine of Franklin, Jefferson and 
Washington, and was embodied in the constitution 
and is the distinctive American idea still, and the 
states are prohibited from doing what the general 
government cannot do, viz., to foster any particular 
religion by legislation. 

The head of the Eoman hierarchy, after a public 
discussion of the question by a convention of Ameri- 
can bishops, denounces this fundamental doctrine of 
the constitution as "heresy and atheism," and de- 
clares that "the civil laws are binding only when 
conformable to the superior rights of the church;" 
that "atheism of the state consists in the exclusion 
from the civil government of all religious influences, 
above all that of the true religion of Jesus Christ ; 
in other words, the separation of church and 



ROMANISM. 17 

state." That "universal legislation belongs alone to 
the pope " and his subordinates ; that when the pope 
finds it necessary he can "dispense from promissory 
oaths," that is, morally release the oath-taker from 
any and all obligation to support any civil laws, 
constitutions or sovereignties, that are not conform- 
able to the pope's ideas of his own interests, and that 
of his church. 

This is plain talk. It cannot be misunderstood. 
This is the teaching which students and all educated 
Eomanists receive in "Catholic schools and colleges" 
in Europe and in this country, viz., that the oath of 
allegiance by which they become citizens of this 
republic is not binding upon any Eoman conscience 
the moment the pope shall find it for his own, or his 
church's interest to "dispense from" it ; that is, issue 
an encyclical directing it to be disregarded. Free 
government, the right of conscience, free schools, 
religious freedom — all such damnable "heresies" are 
to be put down as soon as this oath-dispensing power 
at Eome thinks it prudent to attempt it. Every 
Eoman repeater at the ballot-box understands that 
his oath is a justifiable "dispensable" lie, for the 
benefit of the "holy Catholic church" whenever it 
shall choose so to regard it, and order him so to 
regard it. 

He is also taught in this text-book for "Catholic 
schools and colleges," that "the sacrifice of the mass 
remits sin," if perjury for the church was considered 
sin, which it is not and never has been by Eomanists 
in any country for fifteen hundred years. 

The sacrifice of the mass "procures for us the remission 
of our sins and the punishment due them." Page 210. 



18 ROMANISM. 

The power to remit sins is judicial. The priests are 
made judges of the sin and the disposition of the sinner. 
Their absolution is just as efficacious as would be that of 
Jesus Christ. Page 213. 

A ship-load of foreign Eomanists lands in New 

York. Indulgence in the lump is issued to them by 

the cardinal or archbishop, to swear that they have 

resided here long enough to become citizens ; they go 

before the court, become naturalized, get their "final 

papers/' and at once go to the polls in New York and 

help elect the cardinal's candidate for mayor. Here 

is the authority for the rascality. It is also a very 

convenient doctrine supplementary to the dispensing 

power, which is defined as follows: 

Indulgences are singularly beneficial to the faithful, 
(of course they are — in closely- contested elections, for in- 
stance) ; they not only help to pay the debts due to the divine 
justice, but they powerfully help to nourish souls with faith, 
hope, piety and fervor. By this virtue, the debts of our souls 
are cancelled, we are released from servitude, and our in- 
heritance is restored. Page 220. 

The Eoman power not only can dispense from the 

obligation of the oath to support the constitution, 

but it can grant indulgences to violate it as well as 

the statute ; not only to violate the constitutional 

provisions guarding religious liberty, but the statute 

regulating naturalization and the election laws of 

the states, and thus turn loose thousands of "the 

faithful" (?) perjured citizens to capture polling 

places and carry elections in the interest of Eomanism. 

For "the universal legislative power for the whole of 

Christendom belongs to the pope or bishops, etc.," 

and any legislation by any civil government "not 

conformable to the rights" and interests of the 



ROMANISM. 19 

Catholic church, notwithstanding oaths to support 
such civil government, can be and ought to be 
"dispensed from." 

What safety is there for this government when 
an oath to support it is not binding, and when at 
any moment authority from a higher sovereignty 
may be granted to its so-called citizens to destroy 
it? This is the creed "apologetic, dogmatic and 
moral," which this unscrupulous power which is 
growing up in this country with such fearful rapidity, 
is teaching in its "schools and colleges" and churches 
and which will soon destroy us, unless we find a way 
to destroy it, and the ignorance on which it relies. 

Slavery was a fearful power. It came very near 
destroying the government. It cost the nation vast 
treasures of gold and blood. But it was a trifle 
light as air compared to the struggle that is to come 
of Eomanism. We hear much of the danger of 
Mormonism, but Mormonism is a child's rattle com- 
pared to the thunder of the Vatican. 

There is one direct, honest, constitutional way 
to reach and cripple the Eoman power in this 
country — one simple and effectual safeguard against 
this danger, and it would be easy to apply it now, 
viz. : Let Congress pass and the Executive enforce a 
law that no man shall become a citizen or exercise 
the elective franchise, who belongs to any church or 
organization which teaches its communicants or 
members that its own sovereignty or authority is 
superior to, or more binding than the sovereignty of 
the United States ; or that an oath to support the 
constitution of the United States is not binding, or 



20 ROMANISM. 

can be abrogated by church authority at its pleas- 
ure. 

The decision of Judge Powers in a Mormon case, 
is equally applicable to a Eomanist. It is as follows, 
viz. : 

Niels Hansen, it appears, coming forward for natu- 
ralization, in the words of Judge Powers, " stated that 
he was attached to the principles of our constitution 
and of the laws of our country. "He also stated that 
he proposed to obey all our laws, those relative to 
polygamy and unlawful cohabitation as well as others, 
but that he believed it right for a man to have living 
and undivorced more than one wife, and that this 
belief would prevent him from rendering a verdict of 
guilty in a polygamy case if he was called as a juror 
in such a cause, even if the proof should show the 
prisoner to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." 
The judge continues : 

Thereupon the court declined to admit him as a citizen, 
for the reason that the applicant was not competent to assume 
the burdens of citizenship. He admitted that he would 
violate the sanctity of his oath as a juror on account of his- 
private belief. He satisfied the court that he was not attached 
to our laws or the principles of our constitution. The court 
is satisfied that the allegiance that he would render to the 
government would be qualified allegiance. While all will 
willingly admit that he is entitled to his individual belief, 
when it became apparent to the court that his belief would 
be paramount and his fidelity to the laws and the govern- 
ment secondary, it became the duty of the court to refuse to 
admit him as a citizen. * * * I think that a man who is so 
firm a believer in the doctrine that a crime is right, that upon 
applying for naturalization he announces under oath that he 
would, as a juror, violate his oath, and render a verdict of 
not guilty in a criminal case where the proof showed the 
prisoner to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, is not fitted 



ROMANISM. 21 

to become a citizen. It would, it seems to me, be a judicial 
farce to bestow the inestimable boon of citizenship upon such 
a, man. 

Moreover, courts are bound to take notice of the political 
and social condition of the country which they judicially 
rale. (Irvin vs. Phillips, 5 Cal., 146; Merced Mining Com- 
pany vs. Fremont, 7 Cal., 325.) What is the political and social 
condition of this territory, and how does it bear upon the 
matter under consideration? A large percentage of the people 
are violators of the law. A large and overwhelming majority 
of the people openly advocate the violation of the law. 
People teach the doctrine that there are higher laws than the 
laws of the land, and these are the laws, rules and edicts of an 
organization, political and religious in its nature, that virtu- 
ally rules this territory. The process of the court is evaded 
and obstructed. The officers of the government are traduced 
and reviled. The sanctity of the oath administered in court 
is treated lightly, and many times with contempt, and people 
are taught that no wrong is committed in refusing to recognize 
its binding nature. A government has been formed within 
the government, powerful and aggressive. Allegiance to 
this government is primary, and allegiance to \he United 
States is of secondary importance in the belief of the 
people. % 

"It is unnecessary to recount more fully the 
situation. It is apparent to the most superficial ob- 
server. The courts are busy day after day trying 
those who have been taught that it is right to violate 
the law of the land. This being the condition of 
affairs, the answers of the applicant, in this par- 
ticular case, have more force than they otherwise 
would, and, until I am convinced by reason and 
authority, or by the mandate of a higher court that I 
am wrong, I must refuse to naturalize the present 
applicant, or any other person who convinces me that 
lie is not attached to the principles of our government. " 
It is not wise or necessary to wait until the pope 
absolves every Eomanist from the binding effects of 



22 ROMANISM. 

his oath to support the government. It is enough 
that he acknowledges a higher sovereignty than this 
government, to disfranchise him. 

The rebel organizations of the slave states were 
loyal and faithful compared to the deep, dark,, 
damning and damnable, latent, lurking, determined, 
persistent treachery which lies concealed in the claim 
of universal sovereignty, the po\yer of dispensing 
from oaths, granting indulgences for and absolutions 
from sin, which is set up by the Soman so-called 
church. 

Every Eoman Catholic should be excluded from 
the polls by law, or be compelled to renounce his 
church, while it teaches him that his oath to support 
the government is not binding whenever his pope or 
his bishop shall see fit to require him to disregard it. 

No foreign-born man can become a citizen as the 
law now is, until he renounces his allegiance to all 
other civil governments. But the law does not cover 
the case of a Eomanist who owes allegiance to the 
head of an ecclesiastical despotism in which he 
believes is deposited all rightful legislative power and 
sovereignty on earth. This allegiance to this supe- 
rior power he is not required to renounce by the 
naturalization oaths he is now required to take before 
or on becoming a citizen. But how can he ever 
become a loyal citizen when he sincerely believes he 
owes a superior obedience to a higher earthly power 
than the government of the United States, which 
higher power absolutely holds and commands his 
conscience ? To a Eomanist our naturalization oath 
is waste paper. 



ROMANISM. 23 

Every Eomanist should be required to take an 

iron-clad oath forever abjuring the sovereignty of the 

pope, as well as foreign civil governments, before 

being admitted to citizenship, or allowed to vote. 

Here is what Judge Zane, in a recent trial of a 

polygamist, laid down as the law : 

A man's belief does not justify a willful violation of the 
law. The fact that you claim it to be your religion (and I 
infer you think because that is so you ought not to be 
punished) is no defense. The law does not attempt to 
regulate the internal relations of man, so to speak — that is to 
say, his faith, his beliefs, his feelings. He can exercise his 
faith, he can exercise his belief, but when that belief and 
those feelings become external and attack the institutions 
upon which society rests, the law takes hold of it, and it is 
not protected. 

If this is the law applicable to polygamy, it is 
the law which is equally applicable to that dogma 
and practice of Eomanism which "dispenses from 
promissory oaths," and recognizes allegiance to the 
pope to be paramount to that which is due to the 
government of the United States. If Judges Zane 
and Powers have correctly laid down the law for 
Mormonism, and no good lawyer can doubt it, they 
have also correctly, if unwittingly, laid down the law 
for Eomanism as well. 

Here is the point at which to strike, and con- 
gress should at once provide the necessary legislation. 
All the followers of Jeff. Davis and Joe Smith, and 
all the whiskey manufacturers and venders united 
and working in a common cause would constitute a 
trifling danger compared to the vast, secret, invasive 
and intolerant power of Eomanism. 

It has with diabolical comprehensiveness and 



24 ROMANISM. 

malignity devoured every green thing — squeezed the 
orange dry — in Italy, Spain, Mexico, Lower Canada 
and Ireland. The pope finds the Old World too bar- 
ren to live in, and proposes to take up his abode on 
this side of the globe, in pastures new. He proposes 
to capture, devour and squeeze North, Central and 
South America. He is carefully, secretly and with 
consummate skill and cunning, sapping and mining 
our institutions. The insolent Capel, and the equally 
insolent encyclical of the pope, mark for destruction 
our free schools as the first thing to be accomplished. 
"At the click of a trigger," says Capel, "these millions 
of Jesuitical oath-breakers will rise in their might 
and put down the 'atheism' of free education for all 
children." The atheism of "separation of church and 
state." 

Before this shall be attempted let Congress see to 
it that Capel's assassins of civilization are placed in 
the straight- jacket of an iron-clad oath, with death 
for the penalty for its violation, on conviction. 

It is a question of death to liberty or Komanism. 
Which shall it be ? 

The writer is compelled to express his amaze- 
ment that the Protestant pulpit, in view of these facts 
which indeed are most startling, remains silent. 
The encyclical insolently attacks everything we hold 
to be essential in a well-ordered state, — everything 
we hold dear, — from the Declaration of Independence 
to our free school system and the fundamental prin- 
ciples of the constitution, and yet it has not extorted 
a word of Protestant protest. Every Protestant pul- 
pit remains dumb. 



ROMANISM. 25 

When Ingersoll lectures in Chicago, New York 
or Boston, he calls forth a regular cannonade all along 
the line, from the Atlantic to the lakes, from the 
Protestant preachers. 

Do the Protestant clergy mean it to be under- 
stood by this silence that the pope is less to be feared 
than Ingersoll ? Is Romanism, with only its wrecks 
of states and manhood, its tortures and tyrannies, its 
offensive assumptions of infallibility to recommend it, 
more tolerable to Protestantism than free-thinking 
and the freedom of the human mind ? 

The persistent silence of the pulpit in view of 
the encyclical, answers affirmatively, yes. It appears 
to be either overawed by, or preparing to co-operate 
ivith Eomanism. Alas ! it illustrates and proves the 
truth of the statement in another place in this essay, 
that Protestantism itself is only a half-step from 
Rome. It is well known that in the Protestant 
Episcopal church there is a strong High church move- 
ment. And High church and Romanism are essen- 
tially the same. Overtures for a union have already 
teen proposed and considered. In the sweep of two 
centuries, is Protestantism on the decline and on its 
death bed? Having given birth to the progressive 
tendencies of an unfettered free thought in all relig- 
ious questions, is the mother herself in her dotage, and 
sinking back into the lap of Rome, whence she sprang? 
And will this evident reactive tendency take along 
with it toward their downfall the fundamental doc- 
trines of the constitution, free speech, separation of 
-church and state, and the subordination of the canon 
to the civil law ? Certainly there seems to be a sug- 



26 ROMANISM. 

gestion of great danger of this, in the rapid increase 
of Eomanism and Episcopalianism in this country ; 
in the immigration of hundreds of thousands of 
ignorant foreigners who belong to these organizations 
in the old countries, and who naturally affiliate with 
them in this country ; in the millions of native-born 
ignorant men and women. The attack all along the 
line is being made on our free schools, their destruc- 
tion is sought and openly threatened, that ignorance 
may be increased — that material in abundance may 
be at hand with which to build up and strengthen 
Eomanism and High churchism. 

A representative of Eome, recently writing in 
the Boston Globe, boldly says : 

We want to make our children good Catholics, which is 
the same as making them good Christians. * * * * 
We must have positive Christian schools, (that is, Koman 
Catholic schools) with entire liberty of positive religious 
instruction, even at the expense of building and supporting 
them, and though we should empty half the grand school 
buildings in Boston, and force them to be sold at public sale 
to the highest bidder. 

Boston, Sept. 19, 1885. 
In Boston the Eomanists have recently elected 
the mayor, and have a large minority if not the con- 
trol of the school board. In St. Louis the question 
of taking the children of Eomanists from the public 
schools is also being pressed upon public attention. 
The priests are determined that Eoman Catholic 
children shall not be taught in the public schools. 

Vicar-General Brady of St. Louis, says: "We 
are doing all that we can to prevent our children 
from going to the public schools. This evil is great. 
There is a large number of children in St. Patrick's 



ROMANISM. 27 

parish who go to the public schools. There is a 
large number in every parish in St. Louis. The evil 
is not confined to St. Louis. It is in every large 
city of the country. The Catholic clergy must do 
everything they can to overcome it. We must edu- 
cate our own children. They are educated in the 
public schools merely as an animal would be edu- 
cated. Their souls are not attended to." Their 
souls are not attended to ! This means that in the 
public schools they get the heretical idea that their 
souls are their own ; while in the parochial schools, 
they are made to understand that " their souls" 
belong to the priests — to Eome. And not only their 
souls but their pockets are subject to priestly controL 
— the pocket is the objective point of attention. In. 
order to get at the pocket of the man and woman, 
the soul of the boy and girl must be first subordi- 
nated to the priest and then enslaved. 

0. A. Brownson in his Catholic Quarterly Keview. 
of January, 1852, said: "Heresy and infidelity have- 
not and never had, and never can have, any rights, 
being as they undeniably are, contrary to the law of 
God." Monseigneur Legur, a Soman Catholic, has 
written a book entitled, "Plain Talk about Protestant- 
ism," in which he says, page 98, "The freedom of 
thinking is simply nonsense. We are no more free 
to think without rule, than we are to act without 
one." The " rule " for which thinking is to be laid 
down by the Vatican. 

Page 105 : — " We have to believe only what the^ 
pope and the bishops teach. We have to reject only 
that which the pope and the bishops condemn and 



28 



ROMANISM. 



reject. Should a point of doctrine appear doubtful, 
we have only to address ourselves to the pope and to 
the bishops in order to know what to believe. Only 
from that tribunal, forever living and forever assisted 
by God, emanate the judgment on religious belief, and 
particularly on the true sense of the Scriptures. " 

Page 183 : — " The Catholic church alone, in the 
midst of so many different sects, avers a possession 
of absolute truth, out of which there cannot be true 
Christianity ; she alone has a right to be, she alone 
must be, intolerant. She alone will and must say, 
as she has said through all ages, in her councils: 
'If any one saith or believeth contrary to what I 
teach, which is truth, let him be anathema V" 

That is let him be burned or silenced by dungeon, 
rack or assassination. Let him be dealt with as were 
Giordano Bruno, Roger Bacon, Abelard, Copernicus, 
Galileo, Luther, Wyckliflfe, John Rogers and all 
others that have dared to speak in the past where the 
Roman church has had power. 

Free schools once destroyed, the foundation can 
easily be laid for striking down free speech. Free 
thinking in the public schools, as Capel and the 
priests well know, will destroy the power of the super- 
stitions and mummeries of the church, and ensure 
the perpetuity of freedom of speech and of the press. 
This is why the schools are to be attacked and 
destroyed. Will the American people permit a horde 
•of imported and home-bred Romanists to override 
the constitution, unite church and state, wreck the 
public schools, and plant the papal despotism on the 
ruins of the Republic ? Time will determine whether 



ROMANISM. 29f 

the grand old lessons of the fathers and of the lead- 
ing statesmen, from Jefferson to Lincoln, shall be 
forgotten. It is time to begin again to teach the 
children to repeat the Declaration of Independence, 
and the speeches of Adams, Hancock and Patrick 
Henry. It is time to recall the brave and true utter- 
ances of John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster in 
Congress, when freedom of speech was threatened to 
be restricted. Here is what Webster said on one 
occasion: "Important as I deem it to discuss, on 
all proper occasions, the policy of the measures at 
present pursued, it is still more important to maintain 
the right of such discussion in its full and just extent. 
Sentiments lately sprung up, and now growing popu- 
lar, render it necessary to be explicit on this point. 
It is the ancient and constitutional right of this peo- 
ple to canvass public measures and the merits of 
public men. It is a homebred right, a fireside privi- 
lege. It has ever been enjoyed in every house, cot- 
tage and cabin in the nation. It is not to be drawn, 
into controversy. It is undoubted as the right of 
breathing the air, and walking the earth. Belonging; 
to private life as a right, it belongs to public life as 
a duty ; and it is the last duty which those whose 
representative I am shall find me to abandon. This 
high constitutional privilege I shall defend and exer- 
cise within this House, and in all places ; in time of 
war, in time of peace, and at all times. Living I 
will assert it ; dying I will assert it ; and should I 
leave no other legacy to my children, by the blessing 
of God I will leave them the inheritance of free prin- 



30 ROMANISM. 

ciples, and the example of a manly, independent, and 
constitutional defense of them." 

When a convention of American bishops repre- 
senting Eomanism, can assemble in the Vatican pre- 
sided over by the pope for the express purpose of 
devising the best methods of destroying the free insti- 
tutions of this republic, it is time — high time — to 
recall such utterances as the above by Daniel Webster. 
It is time to recall the principles and ideas for which 
the war of the revolution was fought. It is time to be 
vigilant. It is time every patriot became conscious 
that a reactionary movement is imminent which 
menaces republican liberty in this country; which 
threatens to drag the new world back to the ignorance 
and mental slavery of the middle ages, when Eoman- 
ism ruled the world ; when the pope's temporal power 
was unquestioned ; when the inquisition was a legiti- 
mate institution and its dungeons, racks, diabolical 
tortures and fires were as common as public schools 
and libraries are to-day. It is high time to remem- 
ber that in no country and no time has there been 
liberty of conscience or of pen or of speech where 
Eoman Catholicism has had the power to crush and 
destroy them. 

Whoever has studied the spirit of the Eoman 
Catholic church will find that its priests and bishops 
are prompted by the low ambition which does not 
scruple to use current as well as legendary supersti- 
tions as a means to extort money from the scanty 
earnings of the poor and ignorant. The " holy office" 
is a transparent pretense, imposition and fraud to all 
who are to any degree enlightened as to motives of 



ROMANISM. 31 

men or facts of history. The following, said to have 
been taken from George Eliot's Note Book, describes 
a priest far better than the writer can do it. 

He is equally impressed with the momentousness of 
death and of burial fees ; he languishes at once for immortal 
life and for "livings;" he has a fervid attachment to patrons in 
general, but, on the whole, prefers the Almighty. He will 
teach, with something more than official conviction, the 
nothingness of earthly things ; and he will feel something 
more than private disgust if his meritorious efforts in direct- 
ing men's attention to another world are not rewarded by 
substantial preferment in this. His secular man believes in 
cambric bands and silk stockings as characteristic attire for 
" an ornament of religion and virtue;" hope's courtiers will 
never forget to copy Sir Kobert Walpole; and write begging 
letters to the king's mistress. His spiritual man recognizes 
no motives more familiar than Golgotha and "the skies;" it 
walks in graveyards, or it soars among the stars. His religion 
exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no 
medium betw r een the ecstatic and the sententious. If it were 
not for the prospect of immortality, he considers it would be 
wise and agreeable to be indecent, or to murder one's father ; 
and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any 
man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a compound of the 
angel and the brute. The brute is to be humbled by being 
reminded of its "relation to the stalls," and frightened into 
moderation by the contemplation of death beds and skulls. 
The angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and 
exalting the next; and by this double process you get the 
Christian — "the highest style of man." With all this, our 
new-made divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay com- 
pounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician, there 
is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day 
clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical 
religion and his charnel-house mortality in lasting verse, 
which stands like a Juggernaut made of gold and jewels, at 
once magnificent and repulsive; for this divine is Edward 
Young, the future author of the " Night Thoughts," 

The machinery for the practical exemplification 
and practice of this mixture of deviltry, pretension 



32 ROMANISM. 

and thrift, under the name of religion, is being 
organized everywhere in this country on a vast scale. 
Churches, cathedrals, convents and parochial schools 
are being built and dedicated in alarming numbers 
and costliness, almost beyond belief. 

In an article in the Catholic World the author 
shows the insufficiency of church accommodation for 
the professedly Protestant portion oi; the community, 
especially the poorer classes ; also the ample pro- 
visions which are provided in New York City for 
Eomanists. These facts and figures prove how great 
are the zeal and activity of Eomanists, and how 
feeble Protestantism has become in the great metrop- 
olis of the country. One of the "32 churches'' is 
the largest and probably most costly cathedral in the 
world. Below Canal and Grand streets, it is 
estimated that there are 135,000 inhabitants, and 
only 20 Protestant churches and mission chapels with 
sittings in the aggregate for 15,000. Between Canal 
and Fourteenth streets, there are 88 churches for a 
population of 262,000; and above Fourteenth street, 
82 churches for a population of 418,000. The 
difficulty is that the churches are distributed almost 
wholly with reference to the convenience of the 
wealthier classes ; and there are from 375,000 to 
475,000 of the non-Catholic population who attend 
no place of worship at all. The lower section of the 
city has been almost entirely given up by Protestants. 
Probably the religious denominations most interested 
in this state of affairs will, not agree with the writer 
in his conclusion that Protestanism is in no con- 
dition to keep what it has, or recover what it has lost ; 



ROMANISM. 33 

but the facts and figures which he offers are not 
matters of opinion. The Catholic population is 
estimated at from 300,000 .to 400,000, and is in- 
creasing at the rate of 20,000 per annum. There are 
32 churches, the aggregate capacity of which (allow- 
ing for two, three, or four masses every Sunday, 
each attended by a separate congregation,) is about 
200,000, and these churches are distributed through 
the city with very careful reference to the wants of 
the people. What is true of New York is generally 
true of every large city, if not of every town and 
village in the United States and territories, and much 
more true of Canada. It is an undeniable fact that 
Eomanism is rapidly gaining on Protestantism in 
this country. The accompaniments and trappings 
of Eomanism, as suggested by George Eliot, are 
carefully attended to by these crafty pretenders to 
piety and religion. 

Said a prominent newspaper: "The costliest 
pulpit in the world is said to be that which is to be 
constructed for the white marble cathedral in New 
York. It is to be of Carrara marble, and is erected 
as an offering of the clergy of the archdiocese of 
New York to Cardinal McCloskey on the occasion of 
the anniversary of his golden jubilee. " . 

It was also stated in the newspapers that this 
very humble follower of Him who had not where to 
lay his head and not wherewithal to clothe his body 
even in the cheapest material, actually wore robes 
which cost $10,000, called "Christmas Kobes." (Just 
as well say Christmas billiard tables, Christmas 



34 ROMANISM. 

roulettes, or Christmas horse races, or Christmas 
overcoats.) 

This marble cathedral, the largest if not the 
costliest in the world, is being built by twenty-five 
cent pieces extorted every week from servant girls 
and working men on the false and utterly fraudulent 
and wicked pretense of conferring benefits on them 
by confessions, absolutions and extreme unctions 
(greasing a man just before death)which are enough, 
could they be seen, heard and fully comprehended 
to make the devil blush, and the blood of every 
honest, intelligent man and woman boil with right- 
eous indignation. Perhaps the confessional is the 
most important device of the Eomish church. 

The following newspaper account of the regal 
display made at the funeral of Cardinal McCloskey, 
fitly illustrates the policy of the Eomanists in this 
country to excite in the ignorant men and women 
who furnish the money with which to pay all bills, 
awe, wonder, fear, and veneration as the foundation 
of worship, for its officials. Without their cringing 
fear and perfect subordination, the cash would not be 
forthcoming. There could be no better way to im- 
press Koman subjects with the vast difference be- 
tween themselves and the church officials than the 
noise and expense which they lavished over the coffin 
of the dead cardinal, when contrasted with the miser- 
able burials accorded to themselves. Here is a 
newspaper account of it : 

'• The body is habited in rochet, mozetta, and the beretta. 
On the breast lies a crucifix. The other vestments will be 
placed on the body immediately prior to the removal to the 
cathedral. Nuns kneel and pray about the catafalque con- 



ROMANISM. 35 

tinually. The rosary was recited during each hour of the 
day. Workmen will begin draping the cathedral to-morrow 
morning. The columns, main doors, the organ loft, sanctuary 
and pulpit will be covered with black. The throne will be 
covered with purple velvet, and the floor of the sanctuary will 
also be covered with purple. The day of the funeral the music 
will be rendered by six soloists and one hundred voices in the 
choir, and the vocal selections will be from Cherubin and 
Mozart. 

To-day Archbishop Corrigan received the following 
cablegram from the rector of the American College at Eome: 

The American College deplores its great patron's death 
-and prays for his eternal repose. 

At 5 o'clock another cablegram was received by Arch- 
bishop Corrigan. It was as follows: 

Kome, Oct. 11, 1885.— Summus pontifex dolenter triste 
mintium accepit. Pro eminentissimo defuncto deum exorat. 
Tibi, clero, et fidelibus archdiocesis benedictionem apostol- 
icam peramanter impertit. L. Cakd. Jacobini. 

The significance of the dispatch is: 

The sovereign pontiff received with sorrow the sad 
tidings. For the most eminent dead he fervently prays God- 
To you and the clergy and the faithful of the archdiocese he 
.he most lovingly gives his apostolic blessing. 

THE CASKET DESCRIBED. 

The cablegram forwarded to Kome Saturday requesting 
instructions regarding the casket was promptly answered. It 
will be constructed of San Domingo mahogany, one and a 
half inches thick, with dovetailed sides, a double-paneled top, 
and three-inch cover. It will be gradually rounded at the 
ends, and will be covered with silk plush, the sides and ends 
draped with purple satin and festooned with gold fringe. The 
casket will be lined with embroidered satin and festooned 
with satin fringe. It will be furnished with a satin up- 
holstered pillow for the head. The handles will be solid 
oxidized silver bars, with gold tips. The bars are to be 
covered with purple silk. The plate is of oxidized silver, set 
in a frame of purple silk, and engrossed with the name, dates 
of birth and death, and coat-of-arms of Cardinal McCloskey. 

Archbishop Gibbons, of Baltimore, who will deliver the 
iuneral oration, is archbishop of the oldest see in the United 
States. 



36 ROMANISM. 

The veterans of the papal army at a meeting held this? 
afternoon, decided to form a guard of honor from their 
number for the catafalque Thursday morning. They will 
appear in the uniforms and decorations worn by them while 
they were in the service of Pope Pius IX. 

The Latin despatch from the pope of course was- 
read to the assembled thousands by the archbishops, 
just because they did not understand one word of it.. 
Nobody with any intelligence wou\d give a cent per 
hundred for the prayers uttered for the cardinal's 
soul. But the poor ignorant Eomanist would be" 
more likely to pay for prayers for the soul of his wife 
or child after seeing such a fuss made over the dead 
cardinal. Nobody knows better than Eoman officials 
how to impress their dupes. 

Confessions to priests have two objects ; one rev- 
enue, the other news. Confessions are a means of 
power over him who confesses; power to quiet & 
guilty conscience, as well as power to determine tha 
convictions of conscience, and to control the actions 
of men. The auricular confessional is very largely 
the key to the power of the Eoman so-called churchy 

By means of the cunning device of the con- 
fessional the power of the church is obtained and 
perpetuated. By means of it the sacred secrets of 
every Protestant as well as Eoman family are re- 
vealed to the priestly satraps of the pope every week- 
In case of civil war, or conspiracy, or revolution, 
confessions would become perhaps vitally important 
to the officials of Eome. Henry the VIII, himself then 
a Eomanist, was compelled to unhorse the power of 
the pope or be himself destroyed. (It maybe said par- 
enthetically, that he unhorsed Eomanism that he might 



ROMANISM. 37 

place Episcopalianism in the saddle to do his bidding. 
He wanted to divorce an honest wife to marry Anne 
JBoleyn. The archbishop of London wanted him to 
marry the sister of the French king, and wouldn't di- 
vorce him unless he would promise to do so. Henry 
Till declined to marry a Eomanist, because he wanted 
Miss Boleyn, who was a dissenter. And this is the 
xeason why the pope would not give him a divorce ; and 
why we have now the Protestant Episcopal church, one 

Bide of which is essentially Eomish. A church born 
of the lust of a king.) Servant girls and servant 
men ignorant enough to go to a priest to confess 
every week, and pay twenty-five cents for the priv- 
ilege of telling all they have thought, felt, done and 
observed — of turning themselves inside out to a 
sensual high-fed official — of revealing all the secrets 
of their employer and his family, of whomsoever 
employs and pays him or her, would be ignorant 
enough, if told that the pope ordered it to be done, to 
murder the family he or she is paid to serve. In- 
dulgence could be granted before, and absolution 
afterwards', for such a crime. This is the way the 
French Huguenots, as well as thousands of others, 
lave been summarily disposed of, who were in the 
v^ay or a hindrance to Eomanism. 

The time is not yet ripe for the pope and his 
subordinates to hazard such an experiment here. 
But if "the click of the trigger" which Mgr. Capel 
says is to summon revolution to the destruction of 
our free schools shall actually occur (and it will 
come), the news department of the miserable swindle 
and confidence game called the confessional will be* 






38 ROMANISM. 

come vastly superior to any spy system or national 
news agency within the power of those who shall ba 
marked for summary death, or who shall fight on the 
side of liberty and light against this gigantic power 
of popery and darkness. 

Should it be said a second St, Bartholomew 
slaughter is only a remote possibility in this country? 
I answer, Why ? What does Capel's.threat mean ? Is 
it a string of idle words ? Is the encyclical a string 
of idle words ? Capel probably came to this country 
as the pope's agent expressly to run about among us 
and by his audacity of speech to test the temper of 
Protestantism ; to try the edge of public sentiment ; 
to draw out an expression from the press, religious 
and secular ; to see what kind of stuff we are made 
of, and to report to the secret convention of bishops 
then about to convene at the Vatican to discuss the 
terms of the encyclical, which was soon to be issued - 

At any rate, the encyclical declares just what in 
substance Capel declared. He probably reported 
that Protestantism is too dead to effectually resist 
anything Eome may devise, or threaten, or do ; that 
the (then) forth-coming encyclical could threaten any 
features of our government, or religion, or society, 
with the utmost impunity, and that Romanism had 
such a firm grip on our supposed interests, especially 
political, that we would not dare to open our heads, 
even in mild protest. We are justified in concluding 
this to have been the result of Capel's observation 
and the substance of nis report to headquarters at 
Eome. 

Yet he was right. But to come back to the 



■■•' 



ROMANISM. 43 

pretense as false as it is blasphemous, and as disgust- 
ing as it is untrue, absurd, earthly, sensual, devilish. 

Yet how many millions of dollars are annually 
extorted from the ignorant, rich and poor, by the 
thumb-screws of these superstitions. How many 
men and women are annually confidenced, cheated 
and done out of their money by the false pretenses 
above mentioned ? 

If men ought to be indicted and punished under 
the statute for any confidence game whatever, everjr 
priest and bishop and cardinal and pope who gets 
money by pretending to absolve from sin and its, 
penalty or to get a soul out of purgatory by masses 
should be indicted and punished to the extent of the 
law. 

As a rule, these confidence men live luxuriously 
on their ill-gotten gailis, while their victims live most 
miserably and often starve, as in Ireland, or dia 
like infected sheep by the hundred thousand as in 
Spain, because the church has taken the means of 
obtaining proper food and cleanliness from them, for 
masses, prayers, absolutions, holy water and grease. 
It is time, that civilization should stamp out these- 
vampires who have so long fattened and flourished 
on the blood and the treasure of the toiling ignorant 
masses. Stamp them out by making intelligence gen- 
eral, and convictions positive. They not only fatten 
on ignorance, but deliberately blot out intelligence, 
and perpetuate ignorance, that they may suck the 
blood of toil with greater impunity, ease and success.. 
Here is what the Eoman priests of Mexico have 
recently advised their ignorant subjects. How de~ 



44 ROMANISM. 

graded must men be who will act upon such advice 
and pay for it ! 

You must flee as you would from the plague, from the 
Protestant propagators and from their schools, to prevent 
yourselves and your children from being seduced. You must 
abstain from any service or co-operation in favor of the 
wicked design of establishing among you their false worship. 
You cannot sell, let, or lend them your houses. You cannot as 
merchants sell to them knowingly what they intend to pur- 
chase for that purpose. You cannot as artisans work for them 
for the same purpose. You, the printer, cannot admit on 
your presses their writings, either for being published or 
republished. You, the bricklayer, cannot work in the con- 
struction of repairs of the buildings or houses wherein they 
.shall hold their heretical meetings for the exercise of their 
perverse worship. 

You cannot, as servants, hire yourselves in their houses 
without danger of being seduced. You cannot, finally, any of 
you, afford them knowingly any assistance as to such min- 
isters or propagators of the heresy. 

Here you see set out clearly the line of conduct which you 
must observe with men, who, not content with having swerved 
from the path of truth, which is only to be found in the 
Catholic church, governed by Our Lord Jesus Christ, by his 
Vicar, the high pontiff, want also to mislead all those they 
can. Be therefore alert, leave them isolated, and at last they 
will be compelled to leave, or at least they will not seduce 
you. — (Translated from the Brownsville Mensagero de la Ver- 
dad, of June 15th, 1885.) 

And yet has Protestantism ceased to protest ? 
Does Martin Luther's conscience or courage no longer 
animate Protestants? Does his righteous and fear- 
less blood no longer run in Protestant veins ? 

But Eomanism is the same in the nineteenth, 
that it was in the sixteenth century. It is the iden- 
tical form and spirit of diabolism that Luther com- 
bated. Its doctrines are the same. Its methods 
are the same. It is planting itself firmly under our 






ROMANISM. 45 

very noses, and its iron fingers are slowly and surely 
working their way to the throat of this republic. We 
erect bronze statues to the brave old monk. We 
celebrate his centennial birthday. What for? Why 
garnish the sepulchres of the prophets if their virtues 
are no virtues and we do not propose to imitate them ? 
Who can name a Protestant clergyman who is worthjr 
to wear the mantle of Luther or Zwingli or Huss ? 
(Since the above was written, Eev. Mr. Davis of 
Cleveland, Ohio, Presbyterian, has spoken brave, true- 
words against Eomanism.) 

And our civil authorities seem incapable of 
detecting and punishing crime when committed in 
the name of religion, except in Utah. What would 
be swindling in a spiritualist, or necromancer, or 
juggler, or fortune-teller, is legitimate business when 
organized and made a daily avocation under the 
name and cover of Eoman Catholicism, by cunning* 
and unscrupulous priests and bishops. Here is the 
lame and impotent defense of this system of fraud 
by a Eoman priest by the name of J. A. McLaughlin, 
C. S. S. E., (whatever the letters stand for) of St. 
Louis, delivered, as reported in the newspapers, in 
the church of the "Immaculate Conception" on North 
Franklin Street, Chicago, Oct. 5th, 1885. A very 
large crowd was present. Here is the Eoman argu- 
ment to show that being a slave to Eomanism and 
Eoman priests is the only liberty. Stripped of sophis- 
try it may be stated thus : "You ignoramuses are 
not slaves, because to be truly free you must be obe- 
dient to God. The pope and the priests are God — 
to you — do as they tell you, wear the chains they put 






46 ROMANISM. 

on you, give your money to support them in luxury, 
starve yourselves and children that you may do this, 
and you will enjoy true liberty." 

Father McLaughlin said, "True liberty consists 
in depending upon and obeying lawful authority. To 
obey unlawful authority is slavery. In whatever we 
do we obey either the authority of reason, passion, 
our fellow-man, or of God. Which of these is the 
lawful authority? The lawful one is the one which 
teaches truth and inspires virtue. Human reason 
does not teach truth or inspire virtue. Do our passions 
teach us truth and inspire us with virtue ? Emphatic- 
ally, no. Does the authority of our fellow-man 
always teach truth and inspire virtue ? Certainly 
not, but to man as the representative of the higher God 
does give the authority which is lawful. Human 
laws must be obeyed, but man, as man, is not a law- 
ful authority. God must be the authority to which 
we must submit. But how are we to find out God's 
truth? God spoke in the beginning through his 
prophets, and now he speaks through the Catholic 
church. It is the authority that Christ himself sanc- 
tioned. It is blasphemy and a denial of Christ's 
divinity itself to say that the Catholic church was 
once the true one but is so no longer. If the Catho- 
lic church failed in the sixteenth century at the time 
of the Eeformation, then Christ spoke a lie, and the 
gates of hell did prevail against it. If this is not the 
true church we have no God at all. It is here we 
find true law. Do, then, Catholics enjoy liberty? 
The Catholic alone is free, though his hands and feet 
are bound with chains. The true Catholic is always 



ROMANISM. 47 

free, and only the obedient child of the Catholic 
church is truly free." Every intelligent man, of 
course knows, that this is abominable, specious and 
false. But it passes for truth with the ignorant. 

In their programme of propagandism as a first 
practical measure, Eomanists now insist upon keep- 
ing their children out of the public schools, and upon 
a division of the school fund, to support their paro- 
chial schools where the revolting superstitions which 
have been pointed out are taught as truths of religion. 
Where the books quoted from in previous pages are 
used as text books. Where the fifteenth and six- 
teenth and previous centuries are diligently trans- 
planted into the nineteenth, and where the progres- 
sive spirit of this age is diligently weeded out. Where 
the wheels of progress are blocked with senseless 
dogmas ; where the light shining into the human 
mind from our free schools, colleges, laboratories, 
libraries and a free press are shut out, and the dark- 
ness of the dark ages is shut in. Where ignorance 
is inculcated with diabolical zeal and the windows of 
the soul closed up. Where the young idea is taught 
how not to shoot. Where chains are forged for the 
immortal mind. Where science is hated, and the 
satanic arts of falsehood and deception fostered. 
Where the free-born man is made a slave, and a 
priest a master. Where Spain, Ireland and Mexico 
are industriously planted in free republican soil. 
Where the seeds of poverty and wretchedness are 
sown broadcast. Where moral mildew and spiritual 
blight are produced and propagated. Where God is 
conceived of as a devil, and man is taught to worship 



48 ROMANISM. ' 

the prince of darkness ; and where the pope and his 
army of priests are thrust upon mankind as his vice- 
gerents. 

There was a time before the sixteenth century 
when Jesuit schools and colleges and societies had 
possession of all Europe and dominated the youthful 
as well as adult mind of the civilized woild. 

Little by little, by intrigue, bribery and assassi- 
nation, these Jesuit priests obtained control of schools 
and thrones. They scrupled at nothing, hesitated at 
no intrigue, neglected no crime to accomplish their 
objects. They fermented discontent, conspired treason, 
inaugurated revolution, instigated and perpetrated 
murder. Their secret organizations reached through- 
out Europe and Asia, and extended into Africa and 
America. 

They were so strong at one time that they medi- 
tated resistance, and actually resisted the pope 
himself, though to his predecessors they owed their 
origin, prosperity and power. Treachery had become 
hereditarily inborn as it is inbred in the Jesuit 
nature. Nearly every crime was taught as a fine 
art, or a virtue, to be practiced in behalf of religion. 

Such is the power and attractiveness of super- 
stition in the hands of bigots with wealth and power, 
when applied to the unenlightened conscience of 
mankind, that the race can be enslaved — has gen- 
erally been enslaved — to priests who have pretended 
to act as solicitors and attorneys in the supreme 
court of heaven. What will not a man give in ex- 
change for his soul ? What will not ignorance give 
to quiet a guilty conscience and escape hell? Pro- 



ROMANISM. 49 

faning the holy of holies of the inner sanctuary of 
the human soul, the Eoman usurpers of mediator- 
ship between God and man have subjugated and hold 
in infernal thralldom at this hour about 225,000,000 
of human beings — more than half of all Christendom. 
Why should not our free republic in time become an 
Italy or Spain ? 

Has ignorance and degraded human nature any 
means of defense that it had not in the sixteenth 
century ? Is an Irishman in New York any less an 
Irishman than in Dublin or Cork? Is not ignorance 
as much of a dupe, and educated depravity as suc- 
cessful in deception now as ever ? Is not the ignorant 
negro ex-slave or ignorant white ex-master in Louis- 
iana, or the imported and native born ignorance of 
the manufacturing states as good material to organize 
into "societies of Jesus "(?) as the natives of Africa, 
or Mexico, or Portugal, were two centuries ago? 
The Eoman hierarchy thrives only on ignorance, and 
American ignorance is as gullible and convenient for 
its plunder as European ignorance. This is shown 
by statistics to be the fact. 

In 1785, Bishop Carroll estimated the number 
of Eomanists in this country to be 25,000 only. In 
a carefully prepared paper in the New York Catholic 
World, April, 1865, the number of Eomanists in 1790 
is put down as at 30,000. In 1878, taking the census 
of 1870 and the best estimates of the Eomanists for 
a basis for the calculation, there are now more than 
8,000,000 Eomanists in the United States and ter- 
ritories. 

The following table, carefully prepared by A. L. 



50 



ROMANISM. 



Brown, of Cleveland, Ohio, published in a very able 
pamphlet entitled "The Future Conflict," shows the 
rate of increase of the Eoman element in this country, 



beginnir 


Lg at 1785 and closing in 1 878 : 


Year. 


No. Catholics. 


Total Population 


Proportion Catholic 
to total pop. 


1785 


25.000 






1790 


30,000 


3,929.214 


1 out of every 31 


1800 


60,000 


5.308.483 


88 


1810 


120,000 


7,239,881 


60 


1820 


240,000 


9,633,822 


40 


1830 


480,000 


12,866.020 


27 


1840 


960,000 


17,069,453 


18 


1850 


1,920,000 


23,191,876 


12 


1860 


3.840,000 


31,443,221 


84 


1870 


5,760,000 


38,558,371 


« « rr 


1878 


7,500,000 


45,000,000 


6 



If this ratio of increase is kept up how long will 
it be before Eomanists will be able to dictate can- 
didates for .office, as well as legislation ? How long 
before constitutional separation of church and state, 
which they hold to be damnable heresy and atheism, 
will be abolished? How. long before separate schools 
for Eomanists will be an accomplished fact in all 
the large cities as well as in New York ? How long 
before in favorable localities in large cities all infidels, 
including orthodox Protestants, will be compelled to 
pay tribute to support Eoman and Jesuit schools ? 
One thing is certain from all history, Eomanists have 
never failed to extort such tribute in any country and 
at any time when and where they had the power. 
They have already made a good beginning in local- 
ities where they have had the power in this country. 

In New York city, for instance, Eomanists con- 
stitute one-third of the population. They now 
constitute one-sixth of the entire population of the 



ROMANISM. 51 

-country. See what they have done where they have 
one- third of the population. 

Between the years 1869-71, inclusive, the Eoman 
hierarchy (misnamed church), received out of the 
public treasury in New York $1,369,389. I could 
give the items if I had the space. In the last fifteen 
years it has received upwards of $12,000,000. Prob- 
ably more than nine-tenths of this money was paid 
into the public treasury by non-Eoman;sts. But with 
the control of every third voter, Bishop Hughes, in 
his lifetime, with the aid of his priests, could easily 
induce political demagogues of either party to appro- 
priate the public monies to the use of Boman schools, 
convents, churches and so-called asylumns. 

When official candidates, to secure office, are 
ready to sacrifice their sons and throw their daugh- 
ters into the arms of the Boman church, as Lot 
threw his daughters to the mob, why should not the 
archbishop of New York and Cardinal McCloskey 
and his successors in office, turn such baseness to 
advantage in support of parochial schools and 
convents ? . 

When Bishop Hughes died, the city council of 
New York appropriated several thousand dollars to 
erect a tablet to his memory in the council chamber. 
This was done to please Boman Catholic voters, and 
win votes for unprincipled demagogues. Bomanists 
know as well how to make their votes count as 
Protestants do. 

When Cardinal McCloskey shall hand in his 
checks, no doubt Boman power in this country will 
be able to command votes enough to adjourn congress 



52 ROMANISM. 

as a mark of respect, and to secure an appropriation: 
to pay his funeral expenses, pension his servants, 
buy a $10,000 robe for his successor, and build a 
monument to his memory ; and some executive 
elected by Eomanists , votes, who educates his daugh- 
ters at Jesuit colleges and marries them to Eoman 
Catholic husbands, will sign the bill. (This was 
written before the death of the cardinal. Congress 
was not in session, but the demonstration at his 
funeral was expensive beyond anything that has ever 
been seen in this country, except perhaps that at 
Gen. Grant's funeral. And when his successor was 
crowned and gowned in Baltimore, President Cleveland 
sent Secretary Lamar with an autograph congratu- 
latory letter, and the political press with one accord 
glorified the great event.) 

If Eome can now draw money from the treasury 
of a great city to support its convents and nunneries, 
and build tablets to the memory of its archbishops, 
with only every* sixth voter under its control, why 
should it not in due time seiz^e the Federal treasury ? 
And from present indications it will not have long to* 
wait for the power to do so. 

In Louisiana Eomanists have already obtained 
control of the school board and compassed the ex- 
pulsion of Protestant, and the installment of Eoman 
teachers, generally throughout the state according to 
the newspaper accounts. 

In Chicago about half the school board and 
many of the teachers are Eomanists. In Baltimore 
Eoman influence is stronger still. In San Francisco 
Eoman bishops and priests are helping themselves 



ROMANISM. 53 

from the public treasury to support their separate 
public schools and convents. 

It is well known that the Eoman bishops hold in 
irust for the church the most valuable properties in 
all our large towns and cities, aggregating in the 
neighborhood of $2,000,000,000, which is all exempt 
irom paying taxes because it is church property ; 
although to call it church property is a ridiculous 
misnomer, at least as to a very large per cent of it. 

Not satisfied with this unjust exemption, they 
are reaching their avaricious hands into the pockets 
of all Protestant and other taxpayers and taking all 
ihey can bribe legislatures and city councils to ap- 
propriate by the promise and delivery of enough 
Homan votes to elect a majority of these bodies. 

Why should the so-called Eoman church have 
one dollar of the public monies, or school funds for 
private use ? For it is only under this claim that 
any appropriations are made for parochial schools. 

Why are not Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, 
Jews, Mormons, Unitarians, Universalists, Free Ee- 
ligionists, and no religionists, each and all, equally 
entitled to their respective shares of the public school 
money for denominational schools ? 

If we yield to the insolent demand of Eomanism 
for a share of school money for sectarian schools, 
why not yield to the same demand of every other 
ism? 

Who cannot see that the precedents of sectarian 
schools to be supported out of the public treasury, 
set by New York, New Orleans, Baltimore and San 
^Francisco, if once established, would utterly shatter 



54 ROMANISM. 

and destroy not only our free school system, but one 
of the corner stones on which the government rests, 
viz. : the entire separation of church and state ? 

Yet Leo XIII and his agent Capel threaten rev- 
olution if we do not hasten to do this. This insolent 
demand is echoed by the Eoman-American press all 
over the country. 

Let me quote a few specimens of this insolence : 

It will be a glorious day for the Catholics in this country 
when, under the blows of justice (?) and morality (?), our 
school system shall be shivered to pieces. — Cincinnati Catholic 
Telegraph. 

''Do you believe that this country will ever become Cath- 
olic?" is changed to the question, "How soon do you think it 
will come to pass?" Soon, very soon, we reply, if statistics be 
true. — Catholic World. 

They (Romanists of the United States) are as strongly 
devoted to the sustenance and maintenance of the temporal 
power of the holy father, as Catholics in any part of the 
world; and if it should be necessary to prove it by acts, they 
are ready to do so. — Cardinal McCloskey. 

Religious liberty is merely endured until the opposite can 
be carried into effect without peril to the Catholic world. — 
Bishop O'Connor. 

The Catholic church numbers one-third of the American 
population * * There is ere long to be a state religion in 
this country, and that state religion is to be Roman Catholic 
—Priest Hecker. 

I could give volumes of quotations from Eoman. 
publications equally impudent, equally confident, 
equally ominous, equally threatening. It is certain 
that these threats will be more than fulfilled if 
Eomanists obtain the necessary power, and it is. 
almost certain they will obtain the power. And yet 
we sleep while our liberties are being surely under- 
mined. We quote Jefferson's words : "Eternal vig- 
ilance is the price of liberty, " without to any degree 






ROMANISM. 55 

heeding the wisdom-charged maxim. We sleep in 
apathetic torpor and indifference a sort of moral 
death, while the pope of Kome, reaching out from the 
tomb of the past seizes and strangles the republic in 
which lies the hope of liberty throughout the world. 

The assertion has been made previously, that 
auricular confession, so far as the ecclesiastics are 
concerned, had two objects, "one revenue, the other 
news. " There is one other object, viz. : an opportu- 
nity for priests who have taken vows of celibacy to 
secretly break their vows as often as they are so in- 
clined without danger of exposure. These are all 
auxiliary to the one general purpose, viz. : power 
over men. Proof of this assertion will be hereafter 
introduced. 

It is historically a fact, heretofore referred to, 
that the Eoman Catholic hierarchy has dominated 
almost the entire civilized world, if we include the 
Jesuit societies as a part of it, from the thirteenth to 
the middle of the sixteenth centuries, and does still 
hold the balance of power in Christendom. Its popes 
have been kings of kings. It has held the conscience 
and the purse of the world. It has dictated legisla- 
tion, and indulged the appetites and passions of 
mankind as its interests required. 

How has all this been accomplished ? How is 
it that this hoary despotism now holds in its grasp 
more than two hundred millions of men and women ? 
What is the secret of this great success ? 

When the question is carefully studied the solu- 
tion of the problem will be found to be largely in the 
auricular confessional. The confession makes the 



56 ROMANISM. 

priest a God, and the penitent a goose — something 
less than a man or woman. It is the capitulation of 
the masses to the few — the surrender of the citadel 
of freedom; of ignorance and virtue, to educated 
fraud and depravity. 

Eomanism had no great power until the con- 
fessional was instituted by order of Pope Innocent III, 
in A. D. 1215. Prom that time to the end of the 
fifteenth century its growth was beyond belief. His- 
torically, it would seem that the confessional is the 
chief instrument of Eoman success. 

The object of the Eoman church has never been 
to gather good men and women only into its fold. 
By so doing it could never hope for universal power, 
for the good have always been the few and the 
despised. 

" Broad is ttie road that leads to death 

And thousands walk together there, 

But wisdom shows a narrow path 

With here and there a traveler. " 
To organize the best classes has not been the 
object of Eomanism, but the worst. It has always 
sought first the ignorant vicious, as well as the rich 
and enlightened vicious. Its aim has been power, 
the power of numbers, the power of wealth — not the 
power of virtue. To have wealth it must have the 
multitude. To have power it must have the multi- 
tude. 

To secure the multitude, two leading facts must 
be kept in view in constructing its scheme — viz. : the 
gratification of the appetites and passions by which 
one side of the world is governed, and the control of 
the conscience by which the other side is governed, 






ROMANISM. 57 

and of course scaling down its accommodating forms 
and morals to suit all intermediate classes. 

The satanic cunning of the Eomish church early 
perceived that to reach and interest all classes it 
must make provision for all classes, good, bad and 
indifferent. It has been able to do this through the 
device of the confessional. Here all are interviewed, 
snared, captured and secured. Here all secrets are 
first revealed ; when you have a man's secrets he is 
your slave. Here passion and appetite are provided 
for. Here the really devout are made bond-men and 
bond-women through their blind devotion. Here 
intellect without conscience is represented in the con- 
fessor. Here the coffers of the church are kept full. 
Here the spy system on the enemy is always perfect, 
and his defenses and strength understood. 

The consummate unscrupulousness and cunning 
of the Eomish church culminates in the confessional. 
The confessional box is the Spanish inquisition in 
miniature, in which the penitent is the accused and 
the priest the inquisitor, who uses all hell for an 
inquisitorial machine, and all heaven for a bribe. 
The confessor is to all intents God to the dupe on 
his knees, and the old barbaric God of the Jews at 
that. He is assigned that place by the creed and the 
practice of the damnable despotism he represents 
and serves. He insists upon knowing all the secrets 
of the penitent, every thought and desire, especially 
those which are. called wicked or shameful, and 
claims full power to pardon, punish or reward. He 
also claims power to make an act, thought or desire 
good or bad at his pleasure, which in itself is the 



58 ROMANISM. 

reverse. He can make bad good and good bad. He 

can make fornication celestial and divine. He deals 

with his helpless victim by means of his infernal 

superstitions and juggleries as his greed, his church 

or his lusts may require. His 

" Trade is falsehood, and his lusts 
Deep wallow in the earnings of the poor." 

His part is easy to him to play. He has had 
conscience educated out of him, and all satanic arts 
made familiar to him. His victim is first bound 
securely in the chains of superstition. He or she 
submits with imbecile trust to a priest aping God 
who is morally as foul as the victim is ignorant and 
helpless. 

" Power, like desolating pestilence, 
Pollutes what 'er it touches, and obedience, 
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, 
Makes slaves of men and of the human frame 
A mechanized automaton." 
The confessional is based upon the assumed 
infallibility of the confessor in representing an infal- 
lible church. Here is the authority for the assertion 
from the creed itself : 

The faithful, listening to the teachings of the church, can- 
not be mistaken, for it is to Jesus Christ that they listen. 
Abridged code of religious instruction for schools and col- 
leges, etc., approved by Cardinal Manning. Page 114. 

Sanctifying grace is preserved if we venerate the church 
and her ministers. Ibid, 171. 

Believe in the priest and whatever you do with 
him will be sanctified. 

The minister of the sacrament is the person authorized 
by Jesus Christ to confer the sacrament. Page 179. 

Two hundred and fifty pounds of grossness, 
passion and craft, when cowled, surpliced and com- 






R0MAM8M. 59 

missioned with orders from a bishop, to all intents 

and purposes is God to the victim of Komanism, if 

Jesus Christ is God, as all Protestants as well as 

Eomanists believe. 

If the blood of Protestants had not turned to 

puddle-water or something weaker, it would boil with 

terrible resentment when such things are taught with 

public school money under their very noses. 

The effect of baptism (with holy salt water) * * is the 
remission of all sin, both original and actual, and also of all 
punishment due sin. Page 185. Children dying without 
baptism, though innocent, * * are excluded from heaven. 
Page 188. 

This last thong in the scourge of superstition 
brings from loving father or mother the last dollar to 
pay for baptizing their child. Note how carefully 
the separate threads of this rope of superstition with 
which Koman communicants are bound, are twisted. 
Its devilish coils are wound around every love and. 
every thought, every interest, every passion, every 
hope, of the victim, preparatory to robbing him 
or her of money, virtue, freedom and moral responsi- 
bility. 

It obtains for us all sorts of graces, not only spiritual but 
temporal. Page 211. 

By it sins committed after baptism are remitted. Page 
211. 

Baptism squares the account to date. If after 

being baptized, you steal or commit murder, the 

sacrifice of the mass, if paid for roundly, will balance 

the books again. Expensive but a sure cure. 

The priests are made judges of the sin and the disposition 
of the sinner; their absolution is as efficacious as would be. 
that of Jesus Christ himself. Page 213. 



60 ROMANISM. 

Look at a priest. Nine in ten, judging from 
their appearance, are the most animal, gross, high- 
fed, passion-heated men, as a class, we have in the 
community. How like Jesus Christ in spirit and 
life they must be ! They shrive you for twenty-five 
cents, perform low mass for your soul for $25, high 
mass for as much money as they can get out of you, 
and grease you with olive oil, blessed, for from $10 
to $50, according to your means. 

How like Jesus Christ these priests are ! 

Indulgences are singularly beneficial to the faithful. * * 
By this virtue the debts of our souls are cancelled. Page 
220. 

Indulgences are also singularly beneficial to the 
treasury of the Vatican. If you wish to kill or rob 
your neighbor, get a permit or an indulgence for thirty 
days and pay $100, and it is no sin to murder or rob, 
during the time covered by the permit. Singular 
beauty in indulgences ! But they pay well. 

"Extreme unction" is anointing with the oil of 
olives blessed by the bishops on Maundy Thursday. 

* * It affects the soul thus: It remits venial sins and 
even mortal sins. It completes the purification of the 
soul by destroying the remains of sin. * * The holy 
oil produces its effect on the body after the manner of 
natural remedies." Pages 221 and 222. ■ 

The fools who pay for "unctions, " are confidenced 
out of their money as really as if they had been 
given a bogus check. It is amazing that in these 
days of general intelligence, such impositions can be 
successfully practiced. 

Extreme unction is performed for persons about 
to die — always for cash down, no trust, and for prices 



ROMANISM, 61 

varying according to the value of the estate which 
the victim will leave. 

Having "baptized," "confessed," "absolved," 
and "indulged" his victim, for cash in each case, 
times without number from the cradle to the brink of 
the grave — robbed him all along the path of life from 
behind the ambush of superstition — the priest, like a 
grave ghoul, with greed insatiable invades the pre- 
cincts of the grave with the final fraud of "holy- 
grease," and takes often the last dollar his weeping 
widow has left, under the false pretense of saving a 
soul from an expiatory residence in what is called 
purgatory. And purgatory is a pure fiction invented 
for the express purpose of extorting money from the 
ignorant poor and the ignorant rich for performances 
by which their souls may escape from what never 
existed. 

These are the disgusting and abominable juggle- 
ries and mummeries, deceptions and frauds, by which 
about one-third of the present population of .the 
United States are being deluded and robbed of millions. 
of dollars every year. Who, except these victims and 
dupes, is silly enough to believe cardinals, bishops,, 
and priests are honest in this business of the com- 
mon cheat? Who believes they ought not to b& 
indicted and punished as such ? For the practice of 
these deceptions a share of the public school fund is 
demanded to educate and train men ! Not only this, 
but it is demanded that this system of fraud and 
sorcery shall be established in this country as the 
state religion, and receive its support from compulsory 
taxation. The priests of this system of fraud and 



62 ROMANISM. 

dishonesty claim the power to absolve every Roman- 
ist from the binding effect of all oaths of allegiance, 
or support of the. constitution cf these United States. 
Nothing is wanting but an increase of numbers to 
make this government a subordinate sovereignty to 
and integral part of the temporal power of the pope, 
and Eomanism the state religion. 

The machinery is all ready and in operation 
with which to destroy the republic and convert it into 
a Eoman hierarchy. 

Through the confessional, according to their own 
statistics, thirty-five thousand priests, or thereabouts, 
who are themselves in thraldom to bishop, cardinal and 
pope ; a large per cent, of whom are idle, high-fed and 
animal in appearance, hold in dangerous control, 
intellect and soul, every sixth woman, wife and daugh- 
ter in this country ; and the ratio is growing larger 
every day at the rate of ten per cent, per annum. 

With most satanic sagacity the Roman hierarchy 
long ago saw that by controlling the mothers, wives 
and daughters, who are more accessible, more supersti- 
tious, more devotional, more obedient to ecclesiastical 
authority, and less liable to heresy, that is, to think 
for themselves, it could most successfully control 
society and government. 

Protestantism has learned this great practical 
fact of Romanism and is making the best possible 
use of it in its own system of propagandised . It 
would almost seem that in exchange for the valuable 
lesson Protestantism has agreed never to say another 
word against the great Roman "Mother of harlots" 
from whose brain it came. 






ROMANISM. 63 

Let me say parenthetically here, that the salva- 
tion of society from both Koman and Protestant 
forms of superstitions, depends upon the rescue of 
woman from the control of both, and her elevation 
to the plane of perfect individuality, freedom of 
thought and moral responsibility as a human being. 

On her knees in the confessional at his feet, the 
priest, as God, has every woman's soul in his power, 
subject to his will.. She believes it to be her duty to 
tell him, and does tell him, every month, if she is a 
good Eoman Catholic, perhaps every week, possibly 
every day in the week, and pays cash for the privilege, 
all the secrets of her own heart, the secrets of her 
family, her husband's secrets, her own secret sins, 
desires, loves, hopes and fears. She is required by 
her faith to open to him, and does open to him the 
gates of, the citadel and sanctuary of her own soul, 
and he takes by right divine (devilish) absolute and 
undisputed possession. She fully capitulates to her 
priest and submits to his direction and counsel — he 
is to her the vicegerent of God. She is absolutely 
in his power, intellect, conscience, heart, will. What- 
ever he sees fit to say to her, or require her to do, he, 
as God, sanctifies and makes right, however wicked 
and abominable in itself. Being thus in possession 
of her soul and secrets he has at his command her 
fortune, her husband's fortune, and her own destiny. 
She fully believes he can send her to hell or heaven 
at will. She loves and reveres him, though he may 
be base and vile, because she thinks he can forgive 
her sins or make them virtues. When she is very 
devotional, and has much to confess and he has much 



64 ROMANISM. 

to hear and forgive, the intimacy is necessarily very 
close. It sometimes happens, oftener than is known, 
according to Father Chiniquy, that he discovers that 
the relationship between her and her husband is not 
the true relationship of husband and wife, and the 
wickedness and sin which are possible to 2 priest 
holding so dangerous a power over superstitious women 
is enough to make any man shudder at the bare sug- 
gestion. Should the real state of things by any 
possibility become known to the husband, he may be 
too good a Eomanist to make a public scandal. If 
he should complain to the bishop of the conduct of 
the priest whose zeal for the holy Catholic church 
has been so great, the priest would be removed to 
another parish. According to Pascal and Chiniquy, 
very few, if any, cases of excommunication for im- 
morality can be found. Should the pious penitent 
whose earnest devotion has so often melted into love 
and tears in the sanctuary of the confessional at the 
feet of her divine confessor, happen to be an attrac- 
tive, young, unmarried woman, the result would be 
the same, minus the complications of a husband and 
family ; and the orphan asylum, for which the black 
robed sisters beg so assiduously, instead of the hus- 
band, would take the care and education of the 
children, and the pious penitent would go to a nun- 
nery, or be promoted as mistress of a bishop perhaps 
and be supported at the expense of the irresponsible 
treasury of the church on the proceeds of the con- 
fessional. Chiniquy gives cases of this kind exactly* 
Here is what Father Chiniquy in his "The Priest, 
the Woman and the Confessional " (which every 






ROMANISM. 65 

American woman and especially every Eoman Catho- 
lic woman ought to read immediately) says : 

I solemnly, in the presence of God who ere long will judge 
me, give my testimony on this grave subject. After twenty - 
five years' experience at the confessional I declare that the 
confessor himself encounters more terrible dangers when 
hearing the confessions of refined and highly educated ladies 
than when listening to those of the humbler class of his 
female penitents. Page 65. 

Educated superstition is as helpless in the power 
of priest and passion as uneducated superstition, 
and much more attractive. Of the Irish Eomanists, 
Father Chiniquy says : 

Why is it that the Irish Eoman Catholic people are so 
irremediably degraded and clothed in rags ? 

The principal cause is the enslaving of the Irish women 
by means of the confessional. Every one knows that the 
spiritual slavery and degradation of the Irish woman has no 
bounds. After she has been enslaved and degraded she in 
turn has enslaved her husband and sons. Ireland will be an 
object of pity; she will be poor, miserable, riotous, blood- 
thirsty, degraded so long * * as she is ruled by the father 
confessor planted in every parish by the pope. Page 81, 

*Ihe Irish women always have the custody of the 
cash of their husbands. This is a very convenient 
and cunning device of the priests. The priests con- 
trol the women, and the women control the cash. 

Six hundred years' experience in applying popery 
to picking the pocket, has made it expert. The high- 
wayman is a bungler, as well as a gentleman, com- 
pared to a priest trained in the business of extorting 
money at the confessional. 

At the confessional Eomanism clutches brain and 
conscience and utilizes the piety, passions and pocket 
of the penitent to build up and keep up, from century 
to century, its system of power and crime. 



66 ROMANISM. 

It subjugates and enslaves women, the mothers 
of men. It corrupts the source of life. It insures 
the transmission of slavish submission and degrada- 
tion from mother to sons and daughters ; and thus 
pulls down and holds down a race to its own low 
level from generation to generation, by degrading the 
mothers of the race. The generations of conquered, 
enslaved, subjugated, imbecile women of Catholic 
Spain, Italy, Ireland and South America have made 
the Catholic men of those countries what they are, 
cringing, degraded, poverty cursed, moral cowards 
and slaves. 

And so of every other country where Eomanism 
has had sway. 

This has b6en the natural hereditary result. It 
could not be otherwise. A stream cannot rise higher 
than its fountain. Degrade the mothers and you 
degrade the sons and fathers — elevate the mothers 
and you elevate the sons and fathers and the race. 
Make a majority of the women in the United States 
believe implicitly in a high-fed, idle, wine-bibbing 
priest — that he is God or God's agent to regulate 
their consciences, dictate their morals, control their 
intellects, tell them what is right and wrong, absolve 
their souls "from sin and its penalty in this world 
and the next;" that he has a divine commission to 
search their hearts and know all secrets, and finally, 
last but not least, to levy at will upon their pockets ; do 
this for a majority of women in the United States, 
and you will have enslaved the nation. You will 
have poisoned the fountains of the nation's life with 
the poison that has destroyed Spain, Italy, Ireland 






ROMANISM. 67 

and Mexico and will as surely destroy this repub- 
lic. 

One-sixth of the women are already in just that 
condition, as is claimed by the Eomanists them- 
selves. 

It will take less than forty years at the present 
ratio of increase to have a majority of our women 
on their knees to a Eoman priest in the confessional 
box. Then from spiritually enslaved mothers will 
he born a race of weaklings and priest-led slaves. 

Eome expects to conquer the republic at the con- 
fessional, by the triumph of the priest over our 
women. 

The confessional is the strategic point of Boman- 
ism. Its whole system of diabolism culminates in 
the confessional box. Here every attribute of the 
human soul is subsidized to popery — enslaved, mech- 
anized, polluted. 

I would translate from the Latin the questions 
put by the priests to women at the confessional and 
publish them if I could do so without liability under 
ihe statute. But having taken counsel, I am advised 
that it would be violation of the statute against 
obscenity. The abominable blasphemy of the assump- 
tion of the function of omnipotence by the priests, 
would seem to be apparent to all. But 

The name of God 
Has fenced about all crime with holiness, 

and 

Falsehood triumphant, deadly power, 
Has fixed its seal upon the lips of truth, 

inside of this huge system of sorcery and supersti- 



68 ROMANISM. 

tion, which is fast seizing upon all that is of value to 
liberty, virtue or freedom in this republic. 

It is a most noticeable as well as lamentable 
fact, as before remarked, and it cannot be too often 
repeated, that Protestantism has become too weak or 
too wicked to protest against the advance of Koman- 
ism. 

The Protestant clergy are held in check by the 
" vote-mongers ' : who call themselves statesmen. 
Politics dominates religion — demagogues dictate the 
utterances of the clergy — the stump over-awes the 
pulpit. Protestantism to-day has no convictions of 
its own that it values except on the question of sala- 
ries and future security therefor. Its organizations 
are perfect — its worldly-wise policies the perfection 
of wisdom — it is opposed to all change. It prefers 
Eomanism to Ingersollism, absolute authority, to 
freedom of the mind. 

Is Protestantism gradually coming into agree- 
ment with the pope, that a free republic is heresy? 
that free thought is heresy? that free education is 
heresy? that equal rights is heresy? that popular 
government is hereby ? that individual moral respon- 
sibility is heresy ? and, finally, that Protestantism 
itself is heresy? Ingersoll says he "does not know 
that there is a God," and Protestantism is roused to 
fury, rushes to arms, and hurls a full vocabulary of 
epithets at him from every pulpit, 

Eomanism says that a priest in the confessional 
is God, pretending to exercise more than the power 
of God himself, and plants 35,000 of such gods 
under the very eyes of a Protestantism which seems 









ROMANISM. 69 

ioo cowardly, too weak, or too corrupt to open its 
mouth. 

A thousand times no God, rather than a Eoman 
priest for a God. 

Lord Bacon said : 

Atheism leaves to man reason, philosophy, natural piety, 
laws, reputation, and everything that can serve to conduct 
Jiim to virtue: but superstition destroys all these and erects 
itself into a tyranny over the understandings and consciences 
of men. 

Said Mabillon, a very learned French writer of 
ihe seventeenth century : 

Not one priest in a thousand in Spain, could write a com- 
anon letter of salutation to another. 

Alfred the Great of England declared that : 
He could not find a single priest south of the Thames 
ivho understood the ordinary prayers or could translate them 
into his mother tongue. 

Such were the gods of the penitents who offici- 
ated at mass and the confessional in the days of the 
greatest power of the Eoman hierarchy. They are 
better educated now, but not more honest, less licen- 
tious, or less dangerous to human rights, progress 
and happiness. 

When every one of the sixty thousand Protest- 
ant clergymen of this country knows that the creed, 
aims, methods and mummeries of Eomanism are 
exactly the same as when Luther risked his life to 
protest against them, how can the silence of the 
Protestant pulpit be accounted for except on the 
hypothesis of the great moral degeneracy of Prot- 
estantism ? 

Is Protestantism becoming too weak to maintain 
itself, and about to fall back into the arms of the 



70 ROMANISM. 

"mother of harlots?" The careful student of the 
signs of the times may well fear such decadence, 
and dread the future which seems to be in store for 
the children already born of free fathers and mothers 
and educated in the free schools and colleges of the 
republic, as well as for the fate of the institutions 
under which they were bred. 

The writer is fully aware that, strong, sweeping 
and startling statements are made in this and preced- 
ing chapters. If any statements shall be doubted by 
honest believers in Eomanism, they can easily be 
verified by examination of the subject. Already 
extensive quotations have been made from a book 
approved by Cardinal Manning in 1880. Other Komart 
authorities have been consulted. Nothing has or 
will be stated, not believed to be strictly true, and 
susceptible of unquestionable proof. 

In a work entitled "Pope or President? Start- 
ling Disclosures of Eomanism as Eevealed by Its 
Own Writers; Facts for Americans," published in 
1859, by E. L. Delisser, No. 508 Broadway, N. Y., 
will be found a full and carefully selected collection 
of facts from the highest Eoman authorities. From 
this and other works I shall quote proofs which ought 
to startle every honest reader not already conversant 
with the infamous character of Eomanism. Every 
reader should procure this work, which contains much 
in a small space, and carefully examine it and the 
authorities it cites. If the American people could 
only know just what is being done by the Eoman 
priests in this country there would be an approximate 



ROMANISM. 71 

end of Konianisiii before many years, instead of its 
triumph. 

The frequency of confession and the facility of 
absolution, renders that tribunal all the more dis- 
solute. 

In "Mayworth Class Book, tract de Matrino," page 482, 
a book which forms part of the education of the priests in 
our country, we rind questions of the most revolting character 
are submitted to married women * * * * and to these 
direct questions on her mortal sins she is compelled to give 
direct answers, "for if she refuses," says this authority, "it 
does not appear that she can be excused from that perverse 
obstinacy, which renders her unworthy of the benefit of ab- 
solution." — Pope or President, p. 38. 

The questions referred to will be given further on, 
in the Latin, (if, upon taking legal counsel, it is con- 
sidered safe to include them in this essay at all) as 
they would be considered obscene if translated into 
English, and might render the publisher liable under 
the "obscenity act." The idea of a priest at the 
confessional using language to married or unmarried 
woman that cannot be copied into a public print ! 
These questions are taken from Peter Dens' Moral 
Theology. The author refers to book and page in all 
cases, and Dens' is the highest Eoman authority. 

" The only principle of morality," says the author, "which 
we can find after a research into the papal imposture, is the 
zealous care with which the church studies to avoid scandal; 
and as the confessional gives to the priest so thorough a 
knowledge of the character of his victims, very little, com- 
paratively, is ever betrayed." p. 39. 

In Peter Dens' theology, the doctrine is distinctly 

laid down that a priest may be a libertine without 

forfeiting his priestly office, even if the fact should 

become known. See Dens' (torn. v. p. 287). There is 



72 ROMANISM. 

no doubt that this doctrine is lived up to often enough by 
the priests. The author of the "Pope or President" 
gives pages of facts and examples from the history of 
Eomanism to show that practically Dens' morality is 
still that of the Eoman church. 

Jose M. Samper, an editor and representative of 
the people of New Grenada, a Eoman Catholic him- 
self, writes in 1858 of the dissolute character of the 
Eoman priesthood in Spanish America: "We can 
affirm that a great majority of the New Grenada 
clergy, beginning with convents of Bogota, and many 
of the secular ministers of this city, live in perma- 
nent concubinage. " P. 55. 

The republics of South America are coming 
frequently into conflict with the Eomish priests and 
bishops. 

Almost every mail brings accounts of these con- 
flicts. Perhaps they occur most frequently on the 
question of marriage. The church claims absolute 
and exclusive jurisdiction of marriage and divorce, 
but the legislative power, as in the United States, has 
assumed to establish marriage. It is a struggle on 
the part of the church to retain the canon law as 
against all statutes. This fight has been kept up by 
the church somewhere, in some form, against the 
progressive spirit of the age, for a thousand years 
without success. In all civilized nations the law- 
making power on this question has been wrenched 
from her grasp. Not only has Eome fought long and 
hard, but she has had the help of the established 
church of England and the Protestant Episcopal 
church, as well as the Presbyterian church, in holding 



ROMANISM. 73 

on to jurisdiction over marriage and divorce. The 
Episcopal bishops, as a rule, are as tenacious, meddle- 
some and exacting, wherever their church members 
will submit to be tyrannized over and whipped in by 
the ecclesiastical lash, as the Eoman bishops. But 
it is a spasmodic ecclesiastical death struggle. And 
whether they will or not, they must give up arbitrary 
power over this, as well as over all other subjects and 
social institutions whatsoever. 

The effort of high church leaders to introduce 
the confessional into the Protestant Episcopal church 
is born of a desire to retain power over the young women 
and young men, and so to control marriages in the 
church as to promote her interests. Instances of the 
most gross and tyrannical interference with matrimo- 
nial matters by Episcopal bishops and rectors could 
be given. A bishop full of wine and tobacco, with a 
gross animal body weighing two hundred and fifty 
pounds, and smelling so strong of rum and tobacco, 
ihat his foul odor made a large parlor smell -almost 
worse than a pig-sty, told a highly refined lady, who 
liad more brains than he and far more culture, when 
on the eve of marriage and after the wedding cards 
had been issued, in the presence of her intended 
husband, who was a liberal man, that "she would 
lose her soul if she married him." This so-called 
bishop sent his assistant and the leading ladies of his 
church to expostulate with her, after exhausting his 
own power to frighten her, and kept up the bulldozing 
process by himself and friends, until he threw the lady 
into paroxysms and a fit of sickness, and broke up 
the marriage. The name of this beast of a bishop 



74 ROMANISM. 

will be given if requested. Many instances of like 
interference have been known to the writer. It only 
needs the confessional added to the machinery now 
used by unscrupulous bishops like the one referred to, 
to render their power over the women of their com- 
munion equal to the power of a Eoman priest. There 
is indeed not a half-step in theology or morality from 
high church to Eome. The confessional is being, in 
a modified form, already introduced by the Jesuits in 
disguise, who preside over some high churches. And 
not long since requiem mass was performed in an 
Episcopal church in Chicago for the soul of a suicide 
priest. 

As human nature is about the same among high- 
fed, idle priests in the United States as it is and has 
been in other parts of the world, it may be inferred 
without danger of error, that the opportunities, temp- 
tations and sins of the confessional here are the 
same as they are and have been elsewhere throughout 
the domain of papacy. Are we coming to something 
like what is depicted in the following? viz : 

Clemagos, a secretary to Pope Benedict XIII, 
wrote of the convents of France in 1430: "The 
bishops of France permit curates for a certain con- 
tribution to keep concubines ; and the canons bring 
up publicly the children of those they keep as their 
own wives. As to the convents of women, there is 
now no difference between making a young girl take 
the veil and exposing her to the greatest degra- 
dation.' ' 

This statement was backed up with numerous 
well-authenticated facts by the honest, unsophis- 



ROMANISM. 75 

ticated secretary of his unholiness, Benedict XIII. 
But the pope, who knew a thing or two, did not 
depose the bishops of France, nor even interfere with 
their business of indulging the curates for cash, nor 
even dismiss his secretary. Many of the priests now 
on duty in this country are Frenchmen educated in 
France. Would not a Frenchman, under like circum- 
stances and surroundings, be likely to do in the United 
States in the nineteenth century what he would do in 
France in the fifteenth? A man must .be very 
gullible who thinks he would not. 

Would a girl in America by taking the veil, 
which is being married to the church, and shut up in 
a convent, (how easy it would be to change the word 
"convent" into "harem") and controlled body, soul 
and conscience by priests, be exposed any the 
less to "degradation" in the United States in the 
nineteenth, than she was in France in the fifteenth, 
century ? 

If your daughter once gets into a convent, get 
her out again if you can. The convent is a prison, 
for the body as well as the soul. It is probably in 
many cases quite as much a harem in the United 
States as it was in France. It must of necessity be 
such. Make a woman a machine, take away her 
moral responsibility, and she will become a prosti- 
tute. It is also probably true, and to verify it there 
is much circumstantial evidence, that the orphan 
asylums and schools in this country contain many 
thousands of the children of the pretended celibate 
priests ; children who never had a father or mother, 
so far as they know; who are brought up on the 



76 ROMAJSTISM. 

money extorted at the confessionals, masses, holy 
unctions, and other frauds practiced upon the igno- 
rant by the cardinals, bishops and priests. Why 
should this not be as true here now as it was in 
Prance when the secretary of Benedict XIII made 
his report ? Has human nature changed very much ? 
Paul Courier, who was born in 1774 in France, 
an able writer, an officer in the army, a republican, 
and who was assassinated no doubt by the Jesuits or 
their agents in 18^5, wrote : 

What a life is that of a priest! What a condition! Love 
and especially marriage are forbidden; yet women are given 
up to them! They may not have one, but they may live 
familiarly -with all. This is but little; but their confidence, 
their intimacy, their secrecy of their private actions, of all 
their thoughts, is given to him. The innocent little girl hears 
from the first the priest, who soon calling her converses with 
her apart; who first before she can err, speaks to her of sin. 
When schooled he marries her; when married he confesses 
and governs her. He precedes the husband in her affections, 
and ever stands his ground. What she does not confide to 
her mother or avow to her husband, a priest must know, he 
demands and knows it; yet will he not be her lover? Indeed 
how could he be? Is he not in holy orders? He hears 
a young woman whispering to him her faults, feelings, wishes 
weaknesses; he inhales her sighs without feeling any emotion, 
and he is five and twenty. 

The pope pardons everything in priests but marriage; 
and would rather have them unchaste adulterers, debauched 
assassins like Mingrat than married. Mingrat kills his 
mistress; he is defended from the pulpit: how they preach 
for him; how they canonize him; but if he had married her, 
what a monster! He would find an asylum. 

Now, reflect and see if it be possible ever to confirm in 
the selfsame person, two more contrary things than the duty 
of a confessor and the vow of chastity! 

The Eoman priesthood teach in their separate 

schools and colleges that every Protestant marriage 



ROMANISM. 77 

whether solemnized by clergy or civil magistrate is 

adulterous; and that every adultery of a Boman 

ecclesiastic is holy marriage under the power which 

every such ecclesiastic has as God's agent on earth, 

to sanctify and make right whatever his appetites 

and passions crave. 

In the trial of Elizabeth Barant, a nun of Saint Elizabeth 
de Louvieres, * * it was proved that she was handed over 
to two confessors and they both taught her that no immoral 
action she would commit through the confessional was con- 
trary to piety and religion. Pope or President p. 49. 

But do not get the idea for a moment that only 
my word, or Father Chiniquy's, or the author above 
quoted, is offered as proof of what is charged against 
the confessional and the Eomish priesthood. 

The text-book of schools and colleges approved 
by Cardinal Manning, heretofore extensively quoted, 
Peter Dens, Liguori, Debreyne, Pascal's Provincial 
Letters, and other Eoman Catholic authorities are 
the authorities quoted and relied upon in this essay. 
The Latin instructions to priests at the confessional 
from Dens, Liguori, Burchard, Bishop of Worms, 
Debreyne, the Bight Bev. Kenrick, * late Bishop of 
Boston, will also be given as authorities. 

Especially see Dens vol. vi. p. 123. Liguori 
vol. 2 p. 464. Gavin on the popish church, Banke's 
History of Popes, Egar's Variations, Dowling's His- 
tory of Bomanism, Father Chiniquy's "Woman and 
the Confessional." 

"I say," says Father Chiniquy, "to the legislators of Europe 
and America: Eead for yourselves those horrible unmention- 
able things, and remember that the pope has 100,000 priests 
whose principal work is to put those very things into the 
intelligence and memory of women whom t hey entrap into their 



78 ROMANISM. . 

snares. Let us suppose that each priest hears the confessions 
of only five female penitents, (though we know that the daily 
average is ten). It gives us the awful number of 500.000 
women whom the priests of Borne have the legal right to 
pollute and destroy every day. 

"I am sixty years old," he says; "in a short time I shall 
be in my grave. I shall have to giv3 an account of what I 
say to-day. In the presence of my great Judge, with my tomb 
before my eyes, I declare to the world that few— yes, very few 
—priests escape from falling into the pit of the most horrible 
moral depravity the world has ever known through the con- 
fession of women." Page 33. 

And this gigantic organized system of fraud and 
immorality claims, and in many cities gets, appro- 
priations from the public treasuries of its alleged 
share of the school money to strengthen and extend 
itself. It is growing with fearful rapidity. It is 
vastly worse than Mormonism, vastly worse than 
African slavery, and yet there is no attempt at legis- 
lation, no protest from the Protestant clergy against 
it. It is most seriously a question in the near future 
of "Pope or President?" 

I had promised my readers to give them in Latin 
or English from Dens' Moral Theology, Liguori and 
Bishop Burchard and Debreysne, the subjects upon 
which the priests are required, or at least recom- 
mended, to interrogate women at the confessional, 
providing I could do so without exposing my publish- 
ers to prosecution under the law against obscenity. 

Whether this can be done without a palpable 
violation of the statute in such case made and pro- 
vided, has been carefully considered. The Latin in 
which the instructions by these authors are printed 
is given by Father Chiniquy in his "Priest, Woman 
and the Confessional, " before quoted from, and has 






ROMANISM. 79 

been carefully translated and considered, and the 
publisher very properly, as I think, declines to print 
it in either language, because of its indecency. If 
the Eoman Catholic papers that are abusing me for 
writing this essay, will be so kind as to give these 
instructions to the public and thus prove me a falsi- 
fier, if they can, they will be acting much more sensi- 
bly, though they violate the statute, than by denounc- 
ing me. I want the truth about Eomanism and the 
truths of Eomanism, if it has truths, to be brought 
out into the light of day, where all men can see them 
and know all about them, and so far as I can assist 
in aid of such an enterprise, I propose to do it. 

I believe it to be true, and make the charge, that 
American Eomanism to-day is the same as Spanish 
Eomanism or Italian Eomanism was in the fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries, so far as doctrines and cere- 
monials are concerned. I do not of course claim 
that it exercises civil power, or still retains in prac- 
tical use the inquisition. But I firmly believe torture 
and death would still be visited upon heretics if the 
Eomish officials had the power. But thanks to 
advancing intelligence they have not. The boast of 
Eomanism is that it never changes because it reached 
absolute perfection centuries ago, when it came directly 
from God. I believe and charge the fact to be that 
the auxiliary society of Jesuits as it exists now in 
the United States is the same in its aims and methods 
that it was in the fourteenth century, minus the force 
which can no longer be brought into requisition. 
That it is now exactly what Pascal in his Provincial 
Letters proved it to be throughout Europe, a secret 



80 ROMANISM. 

oath-bound organization working through its dis- 
guised emissaries, agents and conspirators, by in- 
trigue, bribery, hypocrisy and crime, into every 
department of American society — political parties, 
Protestant churches, schools, colleges, masonic lodges, 
the Protestant ministry, civil offices, school boards, 
and wherever they can control influences or act 
directly for the interests of Eomanism, as Pascal 
proves they did in his day all over Europe. I believe 
it will be proven to be true that the high church agi- 
tation is being made by Jesuits in Protestant Episco- 
pal robes and*orders. That they are secretly worming 
themselves into ecclesiastical places in the Episcopal 
church and with satanic industry and perfidy working 
for Eome. That numerous civil offices, state and 
federal, are already filled by these teachers of perfidy, 
lying perjury and assassination. 

It would not be more incredible than many of the 
Jesuit assassinations in Europe in the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries which so startled the nations then, 
to suppose that the Protestant President Garfield 
owes his death indirectly to the Jesuits. That 
Abraham Lincoln was killed by a Eomanist is cer- 
tain ; by a Jesuit and the conspiracy of Jesuits is 
fully believed by those who have been best informed 
of the facts and concerning the methods of these 
hyenas of the Eoman hierarchy. Mrs. Surratt was 
also a slave of Eoman priests. D. Harold was a 
Eomanist, probably a Jesuit, and he no doubt fled to 
Europe and found friends, cover and employment 
among the members of that order. He may in dis- 






ROMANISM. 81 

guise have become an active member of that secret 
underground organization in this country. 

It is doubtful if a president, who should believe 
as Lafayette did when he wrote the words at the 
head of this essay, could survive the term of his 
office if he could be elected, which is more doubtful 
still. 

The Jesuits believe assassination, for the good of 
the church of Eome, to be legitimate and entirely 
proper, and so teach. They believe in perjury and 
teach it' as one of the virtues ; they believe in con- 
spiracy, intrigue, in deception, in theft — when neces- 
sary for the good of the Eoman church. The history 
of Jesuitism is the history of the practice of these 
crimes, according to Pascal and other reliable writers. 
The ecclesiastics of Eome were generally of the order 
of the society of Jesus — Jesuits. As a rule, in 
Europe for many centuries, monks and priests were 
not subject to the civil authorities and could only be 
tried for crime by the ecclesiastical courts. Ecclesi- 
astical courts approved all crime when committed 
for the church, and therefore discharged those 
accused of crimes in its behalf. There was a long, 
hard struggle between the civil and ecclesiastical 
powers in France before priests were given up to the 
civil authorities to be tried and punished for crimes* 
They were amenable to no authority but their own. 
They were infallible; why should they be tried by 
fallible mortals who presided over the civil courts ? 
The bishops and archbishops and priests of Eome 
work as the cog-wheels of a machinery of an infamous 



82 ROMANISM. 

system. The Eoman ecclesiastical organization itself 
is no better than the society of Jesus. 

Here is the oath that every bishop and arch- 
bishop of the Eoman hierarchy must take before he 
can exercise the functions of his office. The oath is 
infamous, wicked, diabolical, and should exclude 
whoever takes it from good society and from citizen- 
ship of the republic, or any other modern civilized 
community. It is wholly incompatible with good 
citizenship under this government because it promises 
obedience to the pope and regards his promise as 
more obligatory than the oath to obey the constitu- 
tion and the laws of the land. It recognizes a 
superior government ; renders the oath to support 
the constitution nugatory, and treason a religious 
duty in case the pope shall command it. Here is an 
exact copy of the oath : 

I., N., elect of the church of X., from henceforward will be 
faithful and obedient to St. Peter the apostle, and to the holy 
Eoman church, and to our Lord, the Lord N., pope N. and to 
his successors canonically entering. 

I will neither advise nor consent to anything that may lose 
the life of a member, or that their persons may be seized, or 
hands in anywise laid upon them, or any injuries offered to 
them under any pretense whatsoever. 

The counsel with which they shall entrust me by them- 
selves, their messengers, or letters, I will not knowingly 
reveal to any to their prejudice. I will help them to defend 
and keep the Eoman papacy and the royalties of St. Peter, 
saving my order against all men. The legate of the apostolic 
see, going and coming, I will honorably treat and help in his 
necessities. The rights, honors, privileges and authority of 
the holy Roman church of our Lord the pope, and his afore- 
said successors, I will endeavor to preserve, defend, increase 
and advance. I will not be in any counsel, action or treaty 
in which shall be plotted against our said Lord and the said 
Eoman church, anything to the hurt or prejudice of their 



ROMANISM. 83 

persons, right, honor, state or power: and if I shall know any- 
such thing to be treated or agitated by any whatsoever I will 
Jiinder it to my utmost, and as soon as I can will signify it 
to our said Lord, or to some other by whom it may come to 
his knowledge. The rules of the holy fathers, the apostolic 
decrees, ordinances or disposals, reservations, provisions and 
mandates I will observe with all my might, and cause to be 
observed by others. 

Heretics, schismatics and rebels to our Lord, or his afore- 
said successors, I will to my utmost persecute and oppose. I 
will come to a counsel when I am called, unless I be hindered 
by a canonical impediment. I will by myself in person visit 
the threshold of the apostles every three years; and give an 
account to our Lord and his aforesaid successors of all my 
pastoral office, and of all things anywise belonging to the 
state of my church, to the discipline of my clergy and people, 
and lastly to the salvation of souls committed to my trust; 
and will in like manner humbly receive and diligently 
•execute the apostolic commands. And if I be detained by a 
lawful impediment I will perform all things aforesaid by a 
certain messenger hereto especially empowered a member of 
my chapter, or some other in ecclesiastical dignity, or else 
having a parsonage, or in default of those by a priest of 
the diocese; or in default of one of the clergy of the 
diocese, by some other secular or regular priest of approved 
integrity and religion fully instructed in all things above 
mentioned. And such impediment I will make out by lawful 
proofs to be transmitted by the aforesaid messenger to the 
cardinal proponent of the holy Roman church in the congre- 
gation of the sacred council. The possessions belonging to 
my table I will neither sell, nor give away, nor mortgage, nor 
grant anew in fee, nor anywise alienate,* not even with the 
consent of the chapter of my church, without consulting the 
Horn an pontiff. And if I shall make any alienation, I will 
incur the penalties contained in a certain constitution put 
forth about this matter. So help me God and these gospels 
of God. 

Let my readere carefully study this oath. More 
diabolism could not well be compressed into the 
same space. I submit that it goes very far of itself 
to prove most of the charges I have made against 



84 ROMANISM. 

Bomanism. My authority for the genuineness of 
this oath is "Cowling's History of Bomanism," p. 
615, translated from the Latin order of Clement 
XIII, made in 1626, by Dr. Isaac Barrow. 

Conspicuous among the promises embraced in 
this oath is the logical and inevitable repudiation of 
all temporal power except that of the pope ; and the 
positive promise to "persecute heretics." 

Let me try to state the substance of the oath in 
separate points. That its character may be clearly 
understood, as well as the character of those who 
have taken it, I state : — 

1st. It assumes to be true, the silly falsehoods 
and frauds of apostolic succession and infallibility 
of the pope. 

2d. It makes slaves of bishops to the pope, 
as priests are slaves to bishops, and people to priests. 
It takes from Bomanists moral responsibility and 
makes machines of men and women. 

3d. It makes it the duty of bishops to cover 
up crimes committed by Bomanists if known to 
them. 

4th, It imposes profound secrecy, concealment 
and cunning in all church matters, as important 
virtues. 

5th. It assumes that the pope, a mere man, 
and not seldom a bad man and a great criminal, as 
for instance Pope Pius IX was — a murderer and 
villain — is God. 

6th. It makes a bishop a spy, detective and 
informer, under the disguise of religion. 

7th. It is an oath to obey and support the 



ROMANISM. 85 

pope by doing any wickedness or crime, right or 
wrong. 

8th. It binds the bishops, all and singular, to 
observe and perform the idiotic superstitions rites 
and mummeries of Eomanism, "with all their might. " 

9th. It constitutes him a hunter and "perse- 
cutor" of heretics. 

10th. It is an oath of fidelity as trustee for the 
pope for all money or property that can be extorted 
from the people by means of the frauds and cheats 
of the system. It is a brigand's oath of fidelity to 
his chief. 

11th. It makes the allegiance to the pope of a 
Eoman Catholic citizen in the United States, or any 
other country, superior to the allegiance he owes to 
the United States or any government under which he 
may live — it is paramount to all earthly obligations ; 
paramount to the oath of allegiance and citizenship 
and paramount to the oath to support the constitu- 
tion. It is obedience to pope first — all other obliga- 
tions afterwards, if at all. 

Ought a man who has taken such an oath to be 
allowed to become a citizen of this republic ? The 
pope says republicanism, free thought, the separation 
of church and state, free schools, the constitution, 
the Declaration of Independence, are heresies to be 
put down, and every true Eomanist is bound to put 
down heresies and heretics. 

Every bishop swears that he will obey and work 
for the pope and his successors against the world. 
Can a man serve two masters ? Can he be under 
allegiance to two sovereignties at the same time ? Is 



86 ROMANISM. 

it noi time the civil authorities in this country were 
inquiring into the secret oaths of Jesuits and 
Romanists ? 

Romanism rests upon the pretense of the infalli- 
bility of the pope. Infallibility of the pope rests 
upon apostolic infallibility and apostolic succession. 
Apostolic infallibility and apostolic succession are 
both falsehoods. It is not true thaj; any apostle was 
infallible. It is not true that any pope ever stood in 
the place of an apostle. It is just as true that 
President Arthur was the successor of the last 
emperor of Rome. There is not a particle of truth 
in the dogmas of succession and infallibility, nor in 
the rightful civil or spiritual authority of the present 
nor of any other pope. It is amazing that such lies 
can perpetuate themselves even in the credulity of 
the densest ignorance of the nineteenth century. It 
is amazing that Protestantism will disarm itself 
against popery by professing to believe and to teach 
apostolic infallibility. This dogma is essentially 
popish and not Protestant, and by it Protestantism 
saws off the limb on which it stands. Protestantism, 
like Romanism, by teaching the dogma of infallibility 
destroys human responsibility and makes man a 
machine. If St. Peter was infallible why not Leo 
XIII or Bishop Simpson ? A live pope or even a 
living bishop would indeed be better than a dead 
apostle. Was Peter infallible when he " began to 
curse and swear, saying, I know not the man?" (Matt. 
26, 74.) Is this disposition to deny the truth the 
reason why Peter has been selected from the other 
apostles as the original pope? "The end justifies 



— 






ROMANISM. 87 

the means." Peter probably thought so when he 
swore he "knew not the man." "The end justifies 
the means," lies at the bottom of popery in all its 
details of fraud and falsehood; it underlies the pres- 
ent society of Jesus and all the auxiliaries of Eome. 
It has been the justification of all its persecutions 
and tortures, the inquisition,* the St. Bartholomew 
and Waldensian massacres, and all the assassina- 
tions perpetrated by the Eomanists from the first to 
last. But how flimsy is the pretext of apostolic 
infallibility or succession ! If Peter had been a pope 
or bishop, and he was neither, and had been infalli- 
bly inspired, and he was not, would it follow that his 
successor was inspired because the cursing, swearing 
and apostate Peter was ? Would it follow that he 
had a successor at all ? Had he infallible power to 
select an infallible successor ? Did he do it ? No ! 
There is no record of it ! Was the bloody tyrant 
Pius IX infallible because Peter was, or was not ? 
Who ever said or wrote or knew of any evidence that 
Peter ever appointed a successor? Nobody. Who 
knows that Peter was ever a bishop or pope in any 
Boman sense? Nobody. 

Who knows that Peter was ever infallibly in- 
spired? Nobody. Who knows or can prove that 
Peter was ever in Borne ? Nobody. Or that he was 
ever nearer to Borne than Lydda, Joppa and Caesarea 
at the head of the Mediterranean sea. See Acts of 
the Apostles ix — 33d to 43d, also chapter x and 
xi. Who can prove that Peter believed or practiced 
any one of the mummeries of Bomanism ? Nobody. 
Who, outside of Bomanism, pretends that Peter did 



88 ROMANISM. 

not believe in marriage for church officials, or that 
he himself did not marry ? Nobody. Peter's wife's 
mother lay sick of a fever. See Matt, viii, 14; Mark, 
i, 29 ; Luke iv. 38. It is a lie that Peter was infalli- 
bly inspired. It is a lie that any pope or bishop was 
ever infallibly inspired. It is a falsehood that any pope 
or bishop is the successor of Peter in any sense, 
legal, lineal, apostolic, by appointment of God, by 
consanguinity or otherwise. It is Amazing that any- 
body can be found silly enough to believe it. That 
any Eoman priest or bishop or cardinal ever believed 
it, I do not believe. They all know that they utter 
falsehood when they so say and teach. There can 
be no doubt of this, for they are ordinarily intelligent. 
The first attempt of a Eoman bishop to lord it 
over other bishops was in A. D. 200 and his name 
was Victor; he did not succeed. In A. D. 250 the 
bishop of Eome was only the equal of other bishops 
of Italy and Asia. In 366 the bishop of Eome, 
Liberius, died. Two parties elected two bishops, 
Damasus and Ursicinus, to succeed him, and their 
adherents fought and butchered each other to settle 
who should exercise the functions of the office, and 
squander what could be extorted from the people. 
The record of the steps, the intrigues, wars, crimes 
and usurpations, briberies and corruptions by which 
the bishops of Eome became first mere referees, then 
authority, then finally the supreme head of the church, 
is among the most infamous chapters in human his- 
tory. There is no succession. There have been half 
a dozen invented and forged lines of succession. The 
bishop of Constantinople arid the bishop of Eome 



-* 



ROMANISM. 89 

about A. D. 451 had a fierce contest as to which 
should be authority for the other and all Christendom. 
The bishop of Rome had the most money and "put 
it where it would do the most good" for his cause, 
and gained his point and established his power. But 
it was not recognized, nor enforced. For 450 years 
there was no successor to St. Peter, no infallible 
head of the church, but a good many very frail and 
fallible heads. 

Soon after this, Rome was conquered by Alaric, 
ting of the Goths, and the bishop of Rome made 
friends with the old German heathen, and prudently 
saved his neck and his office, "by an immense ran- 
som," and by incorporating into his holy religion a 
fair share of the unholy religion of Alaric, and again 
settled down to business as supreme bishop. In A. D. 
454, Rome was again invaded and conquered by 
the Goths and Vandals — the Germans — who had 
popes and priests and gods and rites of their own to 
be recognized. The Roman bishop, no doubt, was 
very liberal under the circumstances, probably cursed 
and swore like Peter, and like Peter denied all the 
features of his own religion that were obnoxious to 
his German barbarian conquerors, and compromised 
by adopting a system half and half barbarian and 
Roman. 

The so-called heathen rites and legends of the 
Germans thus became incorporated into the Roman 
system. 

Among the German importations was the ex- 
clusive ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the priesthood 
.and the exclusion of the civil authorities from inter- 



90 ROMANISM. 

meddling with the officials of the church who were 
charged with crime. This was maintained until the 
twelfth century pretty generally throughout the 
world. Ecclesiastical courts had exclusive jurisdic- 
tion in most matters — marriage, property and person 
of the members of the church. Thus a double 
tyranny, civil and ecclesiastical, robbed and crushed 
mankind. The worshippers of Jehovah and Jesus 
united with the worshippers of Hesus and Taramas, 
the old German deities, and Eomanism became the 
amalgam of Jewish-German myths and superstitious 
rites and frauds. The reverence of the ignorant 
heathen Goths for their own priests was easily util- 
ized and transferred to Eoman ecclesiastics. The 
reverence for and belief in the fetichism of relics, 
worship of images and saints, consecrated cemeteries, 
purgatory, masses for the dead, absolutions and in- 
dulgences for the living, God in a wafer, holy salt 
water, extreme unction, prayers by beads, confes- 
sional, papal succession, infallibility of scoundrels — 
these are the base ingredients of the amalgamated 
fraud which is administered and practiced by baser 
ecclesiastics for cash. 

Thus gradually grew up this system of fraud 
fostered by covetousness, called Eomanism. 

Thus was established by the sword and super- 
stition, the lie of the apostolic successorship ; the 
lie of infallibility, the pretension of universal tem- 
poral power of the pope, than which there are no 
greater falsehoods and frauds under the shining sun. 

Some of the popes have been as wicked as Nero. 
It is safe to say that there has never been a decently 



ROMANISM. 91 

honest one, judged by the standards of to-day. They 
have been elected or seated by frauds, bribery, bayo- 
nets, and assassinations of kings and emperors. 
The predecessor of Leo XIII, Pius IX, was a greater 
scoundrel than has claimed or exercised power in 
Europe for half a century. Pope Gregory XVI, Pius 
IXth's predecessor, was a scoundrel. He died hated 
by the papal household of paid retainers. He filled 
the prisons and dungeons of the inquisition with, 
heretics, who were the best men and women in Italy, 
and died leaving thorn full of half alive tortured vic- 
tims. He died June 1, 1846, and the people rejoiced. 
He died without the benefit of " holy grease ;" he 
died alone, without the sacraments ; he died de- 
spised, bathed, swimming in the blood of heretics. 
His private life was rotten with vice and bloody with 
injustice and tyranny. For two months the world, 
was without a pope. God had no vicegerent on earth. 
There was no infallible successor to St. Peter in Borne 
or elsewhere. The devil had everything his own way. 
But did the world go to the devil in those two months ? 
It should have gone that way by lightning express if 
popery has any truth in it. But it did not. Gregory 
XVI was succeeded by Pius IX, the greatest scoundrel 
in Italy after the death of Gregory. His family 
name was Ferretti. Seventy cardinals met, and 
elected him by accident. It is literally true that 
Pius IX became the infallible successor of St. Peter, 
not by fraud, not by sword, not by bribery, not by 
conspiracy, not on account of merit, but by sheer 
accident. Nobody intended to elect him. It was 
intended by two parties to give two men complimen- 



92 ROMANISM. 

tary votes on the first ballot, Ferretti being one of 

them. By mistake both parties voted for Ferretti, 

thinking the other party was voting for the other 

fellow. If this was not done accidentally it was the 

fraud of Ferretti's managers. He got thirty-six votes 

and was elected the infallible head of the great Eoman 

fraud, miscalled church. 

He had been for eighteen years a bishop, acting 

.as a secret police for Gregory XVI. Contrary to 

custom he liberated no prisoners on his succession. 

He had caused their arrest by hundreds, and he left 

them in the dungeons until the revolution that 

.followed drove him from Eome and unbarred their 

dungeon doors. He retained in offbe every scoundrel 

that had served his rascally predecessor. He 

made many fair promises and broke every one of 

them. Popes can absolve themselves from oaths and 

promises, as well as their cardinals, bishops, priests 

and communicants. The family of Pius IX despised 

him. His own brother refused to live in Eome or to 

accept office from him. He did not dare to trust his 

brother. Pope Pius IX imprisoned his own nephew 

for heresy. His unholiness was the youngest of four 

sons, was idle, stupid, ungovernable and dissipated; 

was put into the pope's military school, as bad boys 

are sent to military schools now to be kept out of 

mischief and the penitentiary. He ran away to 

Naples with an actress, Madame Morandi, who cast 

him off. He returned to Eome ruined in health, 

fortune and character. Pius VII advised him thus : 

Repent of your sins, and make yourself a priest and God 
■will bless vou! 






ROMANISM. 92 

He became a priest without repentance, for he 
was tenfold more the child of hell than before. He 
was sent to South America as a missionary ; returned ; 
made bishop of Spoleto, eighty miles from Rome. 
While acting as bishop of Spoleto, Mastai Ferretti 
acted as the spy of Gregory to betray innocent men 
into his dungeons. The Italian revolutionists had 
taken up arms and Austrian troops had been sent to 
the assistance of the pope. Ferretti had received a 
large sum of money to be used to retard the move- 
ments of the revolutionists. He used his money to 
betray and imprison or assassinate the revolutionists. 
His treachery was equal to that of any savage. He 
concocted conspiracies and hired assassins to put to 
death liberals after he became pope. His treachery 
and lying can hardly be paralleled. The people 
finally drove him from Eome and opened his dungeon 
doors and liberated two hundred victims of his 
cruelty in one day, among them the best and ablest 
men of Italy. It was only by the united armies of 
France, Spain and Austria that he was ever per- 
mitted to return to Eome. Even Lord Palmerston 
connived at papal restoration ; and Eomanists have 
recently returned the courtesy by voting with Episco- 
palians against disestablishment ; showing that the 
English church is only a half step from Eome. Pal- 
merston said that restoration was "expedient in order 
to maintain the equilibrium and peace of Europe." 
The brave Italian liberals stood alone for freedom to 
think, against united Europe. Pius IX was restored 
and in two years revenged himself by the execution 
of two hundred and thirty liberals, besides thrusting 



94 ROMANISM. 

into dungeons and leaving to die eight thousand 
more, and driving into exile upwards of twenty 
thousand. 

Such was the infamous character of the de- 
bauched and bloodthirsty alleged infallible successor 
of St. Peter, and head of the holy church of Eome, 
who preceded the present pope, Leo XIII. Driven 
from Italy, shorn of temporal p$wer, at length the 
pope will seek a seat of power in New York. The 
way is being opened for him. Protestanism will soon 
be prepared to say with Lord Palmerston : -The pope's 
removal to New York is "expedient to maintain the' 
equilibrium and peace" of Protestant America. If 
Protestantism does not practically say this, political 
parties are in great danger of doing so. Indeed 
silence or acquiescence in Eoman propagandism and 
intrenchment in the United States, is the policy of 
both the great parties already. Both reach down for 
votes, not up for virtues — both connive at popery, as 
a few years ago they did at slavery — and so we drift 
on to the almost certain destruction of the republic. 

The question is often asked of the writer: "Sup- 
pose Eomanism is all you claim it is — suppose it 
threatens to subvert the republic and substitute a 
pope for president and make popery the state religion, 
under the constitution which knows no religion, what 
can be done about it ? Is not Eomanism as much 
entitled to make converts as Methodism or any other 
ism?" 

Most emphatically no ! 

"Then, why not?" 

Simply because Eomanism seeks to destroy the 



ROMANISM. 95 

-constitution and to subvert the very freedom which 
it invokes for its protection. Because it seeks to 
poison the common atmosphere which all breathe — 
and openly proclaims such intent. Because it sets up 
what it claims to be a sovereignty superior to the 
constitution and laws ; because it recognizes the pope 
and not the president as the rightful head of the 
nation. 

It insists that there is no rightful legislative 
power but the pope of Borne ; that there is no true 
religion but Bomanism ; that the pope is the only 
rightful exponent of Bomanism; that all oaths of 
allegiance, or to support the constitution, by Boman- 
ists can be set aside by a decree of the pope or 
cardinal; that separation of church and state is 
damnable heresy, to be ended as soon as possible ; 
that universal free education can not be permitted, 
and will not be any longer than can be helped ; that 
equal human rights is a lie ; that free thought is a 
crime ; that the right of the people to choose civil 
magistrates does not exist ; that, in short, the pope 
has universal temporal and spiritual power and in- 
fallibility of judgment. 

Who- cannot see that such a system is not only 
sheer idolatry, but absolutely subversive of republic- 
anism and constitutional government ! 

Ought toleration and liberty of idolatry and 
despotism in a republic to extend to the right to 
destroy it ? Bomanism is nothing unless it is what 
it is above stated to be. Its own definitions of itself 
are faithfully copied in the above propositions. If 
such a system has a right to plant itself in this re- 



96 ROMANISM. 

public, then the republic has no right to protect its 
own existence. If it has no right to protect its own 
existence, it has no right to exist at all, and Eoman- 
ism is right in all its insolent demands. Dominant 
Eomanism and dominant republicanism certainly 
cannot co- exist. They are utterly incompatible and 
irreconcilable. Therefore I say that Eomanism has 
no right to live in this republic on equal terms with 
other religions, which are loyal to the republic. 

Eeligious liberty must be preserved at all cost ; 
but religious liberty is not liberty to destroy liberty 
itself. 

Protestantism, in all its divisions, is compatible 
with republicanism — both can flourish together and 
harmonize. Protestantism claims no right antagon- 
istic to republicanism— no right to absolve its be- 
lievers from their oaths to support the constitution, 
no universal temporal power, no infallibility of 
judgment in spiritual matters, but the right of indi- 
vidual conscience in matters of belief. Therefore, 
Eomanism is not a rightful competitor with Protest- 
antism, or any of its branches. 

Eomanism, with brazen front and desperate 
determination, claims a right to poison the fountain 
of the nation's life — the fountain from which all 
drink, the air which all breathe, so that all but itself 
shall surely be destroyed. Protestantism does not 
do this, nor does any Protestant church do this, or 
any other so-called religion save Eomanism. Eoman- 
ism alone makes this deadly and sweeping claim. It 
insists upon the destruction of republican life, liberty, 
equal rights, constitution, education ; upon union of 



ROMANISM. 97 

church and state, and the abandonment of every 
fundamental principle guaranteed by the constitution 
and laws. No system necessarily destructive of the 
constitution, has a right to the protection of the 
constitution. 

Eomanism insists upon having its share of 
school money with which to support its own schools. 
Suppose every Protestant sect should make the same 
claim? And all have the same right to a division of 
the school fund that Eome has. If such claims 
were set up and conceded, the only practical way out 
of the difficulty would be to abolish the common 
schools and allow each religious sect to establish and 
maintain its own sectarian schools. This is the only 
outcome if Eoman demands are to be conceded. 
And for Eoman votes our demagogue politicians are 
willing to do almost anything. In certain localities 
these concessions have already been made by the 
politicians. 

The school books of Eoman idolators and despots 
teach that equal rights — the Declaration of Independ- 
ence — is a self-evident lie ; that the constitution is a 
collection of lies; that the pope and not congress has 
rightful legislative power ; that the pope and not the 
supreme court has rightful and final judicial author- 
ity ; that the pope and not each man's judgment and 
conscience shall determine his religious belief ; that 
the pope and not the popular voice shall choose 
civil magistrates, and determine the amount and 
mode of taxation ; — In short, that republican liberty 
and religious liberty must and shall be stamped out 



98 ROMANISM. 

by Eomanism as soon as it shall have gained the 
power to do so. . 

I could swell this essay to great length with ex- 
tracts from Koman school books and contemporary 
Boman newswapers and reviews to prove that this is 
the intention of Eomanism. 

I insist that Eomanism being necessarily and 
avowedly destructive of republicanism, it has no right 
to protection or existence in the republic. That its 
principles and aims being death to liberty, it has no 
right to liberty ; all the demagogue politicians to the 
contrary notwithstanding. 

Toleration cannot be right when it fosters that 
which never knew tolerance. It is warming the snake 
to be stung to death by it. Liberty becomes a suicide 
when it cherishes and builds up absolute despotism. 
Eomanism is nothing less than absolute despot- 
ism. 

Look at its system of taxation, by which it has 
drawn the life-blood of labor of Ireland and Spain, 
and let loose the pestilence to devour the people of 
the latter. 

It perpetuates ignorance and poverty and disease 
that it may practice extortion by means of sacerdotal 
fraud and deceit. 

Ireland groans under English landlordism, but 
it bleeds at every pore in consequence of Eoman 
frauds, extortions and robberies. 

The landlord furnishes the land which is useful, 
while the priest gives nothing for what he receives. 
The landlord robs his victim of his labor, but the 
priest robs him of his soul as well as his labor — ex- 



■■ 






ROMANISM. 99 

tinguishes the light of his mind that he may rob him 
with greater facility and impunity. 

With brazen cheek he makes a business of pious 
fraud. He peddles holy olive oil, holy salt water, 
wafer gods, bead prayers, masses, confessions, in- 
dulgences for sins, absolution from honest duties and 
obligations, extreme unctions, invocations to saints, 
mother of God, relics, purgatory, transubstantiation, 
infallibility of scoundrels, consecrated cemeteries, 
priestly blessing of garments, jewelry, houses and 
other property, baptism of babies, etc., at as high 
prices for cash as possible ; and every priest, bishop 
and pope engaged in this swindling business, and 
every intelligent person knows that every one of 
these articles, doctrines and performances, are un- 
mitigated cheats and frauds and utterly worthless to 
any one's body or soul. 

Such are the impositions by which Eomanism 
raises revenue ; — the more ignorance, the more rev- 
enue ; the richer the imposters get the poorer the 
victims become. 

This is the revenue system that the cardinal and 
liis army of bishops and priests propose to substitute, 
are substituting, for our republican system of rev- 
enue tariff and direct taxation. And while receiving 
the cash, these officials are in no way held responsible 
to the people for its expenditure. They keep no books 
and make no reports. They are infallible — not to be 
questioned — not accountable. 

To make this system possible, free schools must 
go, and ignorance must be substituted for education 



100 ROMANISM. 

"at the click of the trigger and by revolution," if 
need be, according to Capel. 

Our free schools must be stamped out, the light 
shut out and universal darkness ushered in. In no 
other way can Eomanism succeed. In this way it is 
succeeding. It has already strangled free schools in 
certain localities and in one entire state. 

The idolatry, anti-republicanism, spiritual and 
temporal despotism, sorceries and juggleries and 
frauds, which constitute popery, are to be taught in 
the public schools with public money in all the states 
as they are now being done in the state of Louisiana. 
This is the infamous program of popery. 

How long will the free people of this country 
sleep while such a fate threatens ? 

Cardinal McCloskey can and ivill decide whether 
Blaine or Cleveland shall be president. Every 
Eomanist will obey his order to vote for Blaine or 
Cleveland. He holds the balance of power, and wilL 
use it in behalf of Eomanism. Ignorance dare not 
disobey him. A million and a half Eoman votes are 
held in Cardinal Gibbon's right hand to be thrown 
as he finds it to his interest to throw them. He will 
find it for his interest to throw them where he can 
get the most valuable returns. (This was written 
before the election. Has not the election proved the 
prediction true? Nobody doubts but that Blaine 
would have been elected but for Burchard's blunder. 
McCloskey had promised his votes to Blaine, and 
with them he would have been elected. Burchard's 
"Bum, Eomanism and Bebellion" frightened enough 
Eomanists from voting for Blaine to elect Cleveland. 



ROMANISM. 101 

But for an accident Blaine would have had the few 
hundred Bonian votes that were needed to insure his 
election. And hereafter no man can be president 
unless Cardinal McCloskey's successor consents. If 
this is true, and there is not the least doubt of it, I 
appeal to my countrymen. Are we not already in the 
power of the pope ? It becomes a momentous ques- 
tion, What will the party that gets this million and a 
lialf of Bom an votes do for Bomanism in return for 
so great a service ? As in the ancient Boman repub- 
lic, can and will political demagogues trade our 
liberties for votes, and thus destroy us ?) 

Is the voice of Tammany, which is the voice of 
Borne, hereafter to be to this republic the voice of 
fate? 

The writer wishes most emphatically to disclaim 
prejudice against Irishmen, Irish laborers, foreigners 
or the Irish cause, as against English oppression, all 
of which have his warmest sympathy. He has a 
higher respect for any man who honestly labors with 
liis hands, than for any man who gets his living with- 
out work. It is because his sympathies are wholly 
with Irishmen as against England, and Borne as well, 
ihat this essay has been written. 

Borne and England are the upper and nether 
millstones between which Irishmen and Ireland are 
ground to powder. 

Let Irishmen cease to support their tyrants, 
whether popes, bishops and priests, or landlords, and 
work for themselves and families. 



APPENDIX. 



WARNINGS OF GEORGE WASHINGTON ANI> 
GENERAL GRANT AGAINST ROMANISM. 

" Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence 
I conjure you to believe me, fellow*-citizens, the jeal- 
ousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, 
since history and experience prove that foreign in- 
fluence is one of the most baneful foes of a Repub- 
lican government." — George Washington. 

"Let us all labor to add all needful guarantees 
for the more perfect security of free thought, free 
speech, and free press, pure morals, unfettered re- 
ligious sentiments, and of equal rights and priv- 
ileges to all men irrespective of nationality, color, 
or religion. Encourage free schools, and resolve 
that not one dollar in money appropriated to their 
support, no matter how raised, shall be appropriated 
to the support of any sectarian school. t Resolve that 
either the state or nation, or both combined, shall 
support institutions of learning sufficient to afford 
to every child growing up in the land the opportun- 
ity of a .good common-school education." — General 
Grant 

The encyclical of Leo XIII. in 1884 was directed 
not only against Free Masonry, of which order both 
George Washington and General Grant were mem- 
bers, but against our free schools and the principles 
of republican government. The head of the Roman 

102 



ROMANISM. 103 

Conspiracy against the human race proposes to at- 
tack Republicanism in this country and throttle it. 
He is fighting for political power, not only in Italy, 
France and Germany, but in this country as well. 
The priest, the bishop and the cardinal, are to be the 
trinity of political power hereafter, instead of the 
politicians and the constitutional and legal officers 
of the state and nation. 

The pope of Rome is to be the President. 

To this end, free schools must go. Shall we 
heed the warnings of George Washington and Gen- 
eral Grant, or shall we quietly pass lyider papal 

rule? 

Shall we surrender the freedom of the press, of 

speech, of elections of education for all, or will we 
see and avert the danger in time ? 

The case of Dr McGlynn shows that the pope 
proposes to dictate the political convictions and the 
votes of all American Roman Catholics in future. 
A large minority wielded as a unit, under our system 
is equal to a majority. The pope need not wait for 
a majority to control all elections. It is not now a 
question of religious liberty to Roman Catholics, 
(and there can be no constitutional right of religious 
liberty to destroy religious liberty) but a question 
of political control of this country by a foreign 
potentate, who denies and denounces every principle 
on which our government is founded. 
x See the oaths of Roman officials, which are prin- 
ted in full in the following pages, which if carefuly 
read, w T ill go far to prove all this pamphlet contains 
against this infernal power of the Middle Ages. 






104 ROMANISM, 

WHAT ROMAN CATHOLICS DO WHEN THEY 
HAVE POLITICAL POWER. 

" That the Church of Eome has shed more innocent 
blood than any other institution that has ever 
existed will be questioned by no competent historian. 
The memorials, indeed, of many of her persecutions 
are now so scantythat it is impossible to form a com- 
plete conception of the multitude of her victims, and 
it is quite certain that no powers of imagination can 
adequately realize their sufferings. 

" Lorente, who had free access to the archives of 
the Spanish Inquisition, assures us that, by that 
tribunal alone, more than 30,000 persons were burnt 
alive, and more than 290,000 condemned to punish- 
ments less severe than death. The number of those 
who were first put to death for their religion in the 
Netherlands, during the reign of the fifth Charles, 
has been estimated by a very high authority at 50,000, 
and at least half as many perished under his son. 
When to these memorable instances we add the in- 
numerable less conspicuous executions that took 
place, from the victims of Charlemagne to the Free- 
thinkers of the seventeenth cenutry; when we recol- 
lect that, after the mission of Dominic, the area of 
persecution comprised nearly all Christendom, and 
that its triumph in some districts was so complete 
as to destroy every memorial of the contest, the 
most callous nature mnst recoil with horror from 
the spectacle. 

" For these atrocities were not perpetrated in the 
brief paroxysms of a reign of terror, or by the hands 
of obscure sectarians, but with every circumstance of 
solemnity by a triumphant Church. Nor did the 






ROMANISM. 105 

victims perish by a rapid and painless dt?ath, but by 
one which was carefully selected as being the most 
poignant that man can suffer. — They were burnt alive* 
They were burnt alive not unfrequently over a slow 
fire. They were burnt alive after their constancy 
had been tried by the most excruciating agonies 
that minds fertile in torture could devise. This 
was the physical torture inflicted upon those who 
dared to exercise their reasons ; but what imagination 
can conceive the mental torture that accompanied 
it ?" Lecky, in " History of Rationalism." 

PERJURY. 

The Roman Church teaches perjury, and protects 
criminals by refusing to disclose facts obtained at the 
confessional. This is in accordance with the oath of 
office a priest takes, according to Dens and Ken- 
rick's Theology, which is authority with all good 
Romanists. 

" What is the seal of sacramental confession ? 

Ans : " It is the obligation or duty of concealing 
those things which are learned from sacramental 
confession. 

Ques : " Can a case be given in which it is law- 
ful to break the sacramental seal ? 

Ans : " It cannot ; although the life and safety of 
a man depended thereon, or even the destruction of 
the commonwealth; nor can the Supreme Pontiff 
give dispensation in this; so that on that account, 
this secret of the seal is more binding than the 
obligation of an oath, a vow, a natural secret, etc., 
and that by the positive will of God. 



106 ROMANISM. 

Ques: u What answer then ought a confessor to 
give when questioned concerning a truth which he 
knows from sacramental confession only ? 

Ans: He ought to amwer that he does not know 
it, and if it be nescessary to confirm the same with 
anoathr "Dens' Theology," vol. 6, p. 227. 

In "Kenrick's Theology," vol. 3, p. 172, the same 
obligation of perjury is imposed upon the priest, 
when necessary to conceal what might convict a 
Romanist being tried for murder, for instance. 

" A man is brought as a witness only as a man. 
And therefore without injury to conscience he can 
swear that he does not know these things which he 
knows only as God. Therefore he ought simply to 
deny that he knows these things; if he has them 
from another source, care must be taken less any- 
thing should be reported more accurately from the 
confession." 

The confessional, holding all secrets, is bound 
to conceal them, no matter if the " safety of 
the commonwealth " depends, in a case of treason 
for instance, upon the priest telling the truth on the 
witness stand. All over this country the children 
of Romanists are beim* taken from the common 

CD 

schools and placed in parochial schools and Jesuit 
colleges where perjury is taught as a fine art and 
the conscience trained to sanction the infamous 
crime, as a duty. Verily, Americans are not in the 
least suspicious of the terrible dangers, through the 
corruptions of the courts, and the defilement of jus- 
tice, which confront them, and threaten to under- 
mine their cherished fabric of free government. 

If a priest ought to perjure himself, to help the 



— 



ROMANISM. 107 

church, of course a layman ought; and in the name 
of religion, and by the sanction of conscience. A 
Romanist asked as to his qualifications as a juryman 
can answer falsely, and a jury can thus be packed to 
take the life of a Protestant heretic; or a witness, 
being a Romanist, may perjure himself to save the 
neck of a Catholic who has assassinated a heretic, 
and so on to the end of the list of cases where the 
obligation, and duly of perjury may be advantage- 
ously used " for the benefit of the church and the 
glory of God." 

THE NUNNERIES. 

The following I have copied from a volume of 
375 pages, published in 1871 by John Alberger, Bal- 
timore, who is also the writer of the work, entitled, 
" Monks, Popes, and their Political Intrigues." It 
is the ablest and best work, so far as it £oes, that 
the writer has seen upon the subject of which it 
treats. All Americans should read it. I quote the 
extracts from William Hogan, as I find them in Mr. 
Alberger's work, not being able to procure Mr. 
Hogan's book. 

These facts show what may be expected, to a 
greater or less extent of wickedness, in all nunneries. 
If they are what they pretend to be, why should 
they be guarded by high walls, locks and bars, and 
be kept hidden from the public? All good deeds 
can bear the light. People " love darkness rather 
than light, because their deeds are evil." 

" The following additional facts, related by Wil- 
liam Hogan, as having transpired under his personal 



ioS ROMANISM. 

cognizance, afford further confirmative proof of the 
general character of priests and nuns, and that it 
remains, as it has always been, in all countries, and 
at all periods of civilization:" 

"The Roman Catholics of Albany," says he, 
" had, about three years previous to my coming 
among them, three Irish priests among them, occa- 
sionally preaching, but always hearing confessions. 
. . . As soon as I go.t settled hi Albany I had, of 
course to attend to the duty of auricular confession, 
and in less than two months found that the priests, 
during the time they were there, were the fathers of 
between sixty and one hundred children, besides 
having debauched many who had left the place pre- 
vious to their confinement." ("Auricular Confes- 
sion," p. 46). 

" A short time previous to my coming to this 
country, and soon after my being installed as con- 
fessor in the Romish Church, I became intimately 
acquainted with a family of great respectability. 
This family consisted of a widowed father and two 
daughters, and never in my life have I met with 
more interesting young ladies than the daughters 
were. . . In less than two months after my first 
visit to this family, at their peaceful and respect- 
able bre ikfast table, I observed the chair which had 
been usually occupied by the elder of the two ladies 
occupied by the younger, and that of the latter to be 
vacant. I inquired the cause, and was informed by 
the father that he had just accompanied her to the 
coach, which had left that morning for Dublin, and 
that she went on a visit to the Rev. B. K. It seems 
that both of the daughters of whom I have spoken 



ROMANISM. 109. 

went to the school attached to the nunnery of the city 

of _. The confessor whose duty it was to hear 

the confessions of the pupils of the institute, was one 
Rev. B. K., a friar of the Franciscan order, who, as 
soon as his plans were properly laid, and circum- 
stances rendered them ripe for execution, seduced the 
elder lady; and finding the fact could no longer be 
concealed, arranged matters with a Dublin friend. . . 
She was confined at the house of his friend, and 
her illicit offspring given to the managers of the 
foundling hospital in Dublin. • . No sooner was 
this elder lady provided for than this incarnate de- 
mon, B. K., commenced the seduction of the younger 
lady. He succeeded, and ruined her, too. But there 
was no difficulty in providing for them. They both 
became nuns. . . I saw them in the convent at 
Mount Benedict. They were great favorites of Bishop. 
Fenton. They were spoken of by some of the females 
of Boston as models of piety." ("Auricular Confes- 
sion," 100-106). 

"Soon after my arrival in Philadelphia, a 
Roman Catholic priest by the name of O. S- called oil 
me and showed me letters of recommendation which 
he had from Bishop T., of Ireland, and countersigned 
by the Roman Catholic bishop of New York, to 
Bishop England, of South Carolina. . . He ar- 
rived at Charleston, and was well received by Bishop 
England. There lived in the parish to which this 
reverend confessor was appointed, a gentleman of 
respectability and wealth. Bishop England supplied 
this new missionary with letters of strong recom- 
mendation to this gentleman, advising him to place 
his children under his charge, assuring him they would 



no ROMANISM. 

be brought up in the fear of Grocl and love of religion. 
The Bov. Popish wretch seduced the eldest 
daughter of his benefactor, and the father becoming 
aware of the fact, armed himself with a case of pis- 
tols, and determined to shoot the seducer. But there 
was in the house a good Catholic servant (a spy) 
who advised the seducer to fly. He soon arrived in 
Charleston; the right reverend Jbishop understood 
his case, advised him to go to confession, and absolved 
him from his sins; . . and sent him on his way 
to New York. . . His victim after a little time, 
having given birth to a fine boy, goes to confession 
herself, and sends the child of sin to the Sisters of 

Charity residing in to be taken care of as a 

nullius filius. As soon as the child was able to 
walk, a Koman Catholic lady adopted it as her 
own. The real mother of the child soon removed to 

the city of , told the whole transaction to the 

Catholic bishop of , who knowing that she 

had a handsome property, introduced her to a highly 
respectable Protestant gentleman, who soon married 
her. He (the bishop) soon after introduced the gen- 
tleman to the Sisters of Charity who had provided 
for the illicit offspring of the priest, concealing its 
parentage, and representing it as having no father 
living. The gentleman was pleased with the boy, 
and the holy bishop finally prevailed on him and his 
wife to adopt it as his own. ("Auricular Confession," 
p. 111-115). 

" When quite young and just emerging from child- 
hood, I became acquainted with a Protestant family, 
residing in the neighborhood of my birthplace. It 
consisted of a mother (a widow), and three interest- 



ROMANISM. in 

ing children, two sons and one daughter. . . In 
the course of time the sons grew up, and their guar- 
dian, in compliance with their wishes, and to gratify 
their ambition, procured them commissions in the 
army. . ' . As soon as the sons left to join their 
respective regiments, which were then on the Conti- 
nent, the mother and daughter were much alone. 
. • . . There was then in the neighborhood, only 
twenty miles from this family, a nunnery of the order 
of Jesuits. To this nunnery was attached a school 
superintended by the nuns of that order. . . The 
mother yielded, in this case, to the malign influence 
of fashion; . . sent her beautiful daughter, her 
earthly treasure, to the school of these nuns. 
Soon after the daughter was sent to school, I entered 
the college of Maynooth as a theological student, and 
in due time was ordained a Catholic priest. An in- 
terval of some years passed. . . There was a large 
party given, at which among others I happened to 
be present; and there meeting with my friends and 
interchanging the usual courtesies on such occasions, 
she sportingly, as I then imagined, asked me whether 
I would preach her reception sermon, as she intended 
becoming a nun and taking the veil. I heard no 
more of the affair until about two mounths, after 
when I received a note from her designating the 
chapel in which she expected my services. . . On the 
reception of my friend's note a cold chill crept over 
me, I anticipated and trembled, and felt there must 
be foul play. . . Having no connection with the 
convent in which she was immured, I did not see her 
for three months following. At the expiration of 
that time one of the lay sisters delivered me a note. 






H2 ROMANISM. 

. . . I found my young friend wished to see me 
on something important. I of course lost no time 
in calling on her, and being a priest, I was imme- 
diately admitted; but never have I forgotten, never 
can I forget, the melancholy picture of lost beauty 
and fallen humanity which met my astonished gaze 
in the person of my once beautiful and virtuous 
friend. . . "I sent for you, my friend, to see you 
once before my death. . .1 am in the family- way 
and must die." 

He then proceeds to relate, that in the course of 
a conversation which ensued he learned from the nun 
that she had been seduced by her confessor (which 
fact precluded any appeal or redress), and that the 
lady abbess had proposed to procure an abortion, 
but that an inmate had informed her that the medi- 
cine, which the lady abbess would give would contain 
poison. He promised to renew his visit within a 
few days; he did so, but the foul deed was done. 



THE POPE'S CURSE OF VICTOR EMMANUEL. 

Victor Emmanuel and his patriotic countrymen 
wrested the temporal power from Pius IX, and 
liberated the Italian people from the power of the 
Church of Rome forever, so far as civil government 
is concerned. Being otherwise powerless, the pope 
strikes back, with a curse, which is here given, as 
printed in the Philadelphia Morning Post It is the 
perfection of pious swearing by the Vicegerent of 
God, who said " swear not at all." 

" By authority of the Almighty God, the Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost, and of the Holy Canons, and 



ROMANISM. 113 

of the undefiled Virgin Mary, mother and nurse of 
our Saviour, and of the celestial virtues, angels, 
archangels, thrones, dominions, powers, cherubims, 
and seraphims; and of all the holy patriarchs and 
prophets; and of all the apostles and evangelists; 
and of the holy innocents, who, in the sight of the 
Holy Lamb, are found worthy to sing the new song; 
and of the holy martyrs and holy confessors, and of 
the holy virgins, and of all the saints, together with 
all the holy and elect of God, we excommunicate and 
anathematize him, and from the threshold of the holy 
church of God Almighty we sequester him, that he 
may be tormented in eternal excruciating sufferings, 
together with Dathan and Abiram, and those who 
say to the Lord God, "Depart from us; we desire 
none of Thy ways." And as fire is quenched with 
water, 4 so let the light of him be put out forevermore. 
May the Son who suffered for us curse him. May 
the Father who created man curse him. May the 
Holy Ghost which was given to us in our baptism 
curse him. May the Holy Cross which Christ, for 
our salvation triumphing over his enemies, ascended, 
curse him. May the Holy and eternal Virgin Mary, 
mother of God, curse him. May St. Michael, the 
advocate of holy souls, curse him. May all the 
angels and archangels, principalities and powers, 
and all the heavenly armies, curse him. May St. 
John, the precursor, and St. Peter, and St. Paul, and 
St. John the Baptist, and St. Andrew, and all other 
Christ's apostles together curse him, and may the 
rest of his disciples and four Evangelists, who, by 
their preaching converted the universal world — and 
may the holy and wonderful company of martyrs 



n 4 ROMANISM. 

and confessors, who by their holy work are found 
pleading to God Almighty — curse him. May the 
Choir of the Holy Virgins, who, for the honor of 
Christ have despised the things of this world, damn 
him. May all the saints who from the beginning of 
the world and everlasting ages are found to be beloved 
of God, damn him. May the heavens, and the earth, 
and all things remaining therein, damn him. 

May he be damned wherever he maybe; whether 
in the house or in the field, whether in the highway 
or on the byway, whether in the wood or water, or 
whether in the church. May he be cursed in living 
and dying, in eating and drinking, in fasting and 
thirsting, in slumbering and sleeping, in watching 
or walking, in standing or sitting, in lying down 
or walking, mingendo, cancando, and in blood-letting. 
May he be cursed in all the faculties of his body. 
May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly. May he 
be cursed in his hair. May he be cursed in his brain. 
May he be cursed in the crown of his head and in 
his temples. In his forehead and in his ears. In his 
eyebrows and in his cheeks. In his jawbones and in 
his nostrils. In his foreteeth and in his grinders. 
In his lips and in his throat. In his shoulders and 
in his wrists. In his arms, his hands, and in his fin- 
gers. May he be damned in his mouth, in his 
breast, in his heart, and in all the viscera of his 
body. May he be damned in his veins and in his 
groin; in his thighs and genital organs; in his 
hips and in his knees; in his legs, feet, and toe 
nails. 

May he be cursed in all the joints and articula- 
tions of his body. From the top of his head to the 



ROMANISM, 115 

sole of his foot may there be no soundness in him. 
May the Son of the living Gocl, with all the glory 
of His Majesty, curse him, and may heaven, with all 
the powers that move therein, rise up against him — 
curse and damn him ! Amen. So let it be ! Amen. 

ROMISH PRIEST'S OATH. 

I, A. B., do acknowledge the ecclesiastical power 
of His Holiness and the mother Church of Rome, as 
the chief head and matron above all pretended 
churches throughout the whole earth; and that my 
zeal shall be for St. Peter and his successors, as the 
founder of the true and ancient Catholic faith, 
against all heretical kings, princes, states or powers, 
repugnant unto the same; and although I, A. B., 
may follow, in case of persecution, or otherwise to 
be heretically despised, yet in soul and conscience I 
shall hold, aid, and succor the mother Church of 
Rome;, as the true, ancient, and apostolic church; I, 
A. B., further do declare not to act or control any 
matter or thing prejudicial unto her, in her sacred 
orders, doctrines, tenets or commands, without leave 
of its supreme power or its authority, under her ap- 
pointed, or to be appointed; and being so permitted, 
then to act, and further her interests more than my 
own earthly good and earthly pleasure, as she and 
her Head, His Holiness, and His successors have, or 
ought to have, the supremacy over all kings, princes, 
estates, or powers whatsoever, either to deprive them 
of their crowns, scepters, powers, privileges, realms, 
countries, or governments, or to set up others in lieu 
thereof, they dissenting from the mother church and 
her commands. 



n6 ROMANISM. 

THE JESUIT'S OATH. 

I, A. B., now in the presence of Almighty God, 
the blessed Virgin Mary, the blessed Michael the 
Archangel, the blessed St. John the Baptist, the holy 
apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, and all the saints and 
sacred hosts of Heaven, and to you my ghostly father, 
do declare from my heart, without mental reserva- 
tion, that -his holiness Pope as Christ's Vicar- 
General, and is the true and only head of the Catholic 
or Universal church throughout the earth; and that 
by the virtue of the keys of binding and losing,, 
given to his Holiness by me Saviour Jesus Christ, he 
hath power to depose heretical kings, princes, states, 
commonwealths, and governments, all being illegal 
without his sacred confirmation, and that they may 
safely be destroyed; therefore, to the utmost of my 
power, I shall, and will defend this doctrine and his 
Holiness' rights and customs, against all usurpers of 
the heretical (or Protestant) authority whatsoever; 
especially against the not pretended authority and 
Church of England, and all adherents, in regard that 
they and she be usurpal and heretical, opposing the 
sacred mother Church of Rome. 

I do renounce and disown any allegiance as due 
to any heretical king, prince, or state, named Protest- 
ants, or obedience to any of their inferior magistrates 
or officers. I do further declare that the doctrine of 
the Church of England, the Calvinists, Huguenots, 
and of others of the name of Protestants, to be 
damnable, and they themselves are damned, and to 
be damned, that will not forsake the same. 

1 do further declare, that I will help, assist, and 
advise all or any of his Holiness' agents in any place 



ROMANISM, 117 

•wherever I shall be in England, Scotland, and Ire- 
land, or in any other territory or kingdom I shall 
€ome to, and do my utmost to extirpate the heretical 
Protestants' doctrine, and to destroy all their pre- 
tended powers, regal or otherwise. I do further 
promise and declare, that notwithstanding I am dis- 
pensed with, to assume any religion heretical for the 
propagating of the mother church's interest, to keep 
secret and private all her agents' counsels from time 
to time, as they entrust me, and not to divulge, di- 
Tectly or indirectly, by word, writing, or circum- 
stance whatsoever, but to execute all that shall be 
proposed, given in charge, or discovered unto me, by 
you, my ghostly father, or any of this sacred con- 
vent. All which I, A. B., do swear by the blessed 
Trinity, and blessed Sacrament, which I am now to 
receive, to perform, and on my part to keep inviolably; 
and do call all the heavenly and glorious host of 
heaven to witness these my real intentions, to keep 
this my oath. In testimony hereof, I take this most 
holy and blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist; and 
witness the same further with my hand and seal, in 
the face of this holy convent, this .... day of .... 
An. Dom., etc. 

OATH OF LAYMAN, 
COMMONLY CALLED THE CREED OF POPE PIUS IV 

I, N. N., with a firm faith, believe and profess 
all and every of those things which are contained in 
that creed, which the holy Roman Church maketh 
use of. To-wit: I believe in one God, the Father 
Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things, 
visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, 



n8 ROMANISM. 

the only begotten Son of God, born of the Father 
before all ages; God of God; light of light; true God 
of the true God; begotten, not made; consubstantial 
with the Father, by whom all things were made. 

Who for us men, and for our salvation, came 
down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy 
Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man. He 
was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered, 
and was buried. And the third day he rose again 
according to the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven,, 
sitteth at the right hand of the Father,, and shall 
come again with glory to judge the living and the 
dead; of whose kingdom there shall be no end. 

I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and the life- 
giver, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son; 
who, together with the Father and the Son, is adored 
and glorified; who spake by the prophets. And in 
one holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. 

I confess one baptism for the remission of sins; 
and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the 
life of the world to come. Amen. 

I most steadfastly admit and embrace the apos- 
tolical and ecclesiastical traditions, and all other 
observances and constitutions of the same church. 

I also admit the holy Scriptures, according to 
that sense which our holy mother the church hath 
held and doth hold, to whom it belongeth to judge 
of the true sense and interpretation of the Scriptures; 
neither will I ever take and interpret them otherwise 
than according to the unanimous consent of the 
Fathers. 

I also profess that there are truly and properly 
seven sacraments of the new law, instituted by Jesus. 



ROMANISM. 119 

Christ our Lord, and necessary for the salvation of 
mankind, though not all for everyone; to-wit: Bap- 
tism, confirmation, the eucharist, penance, extreme 
unction, order, and matrimony; and that they con- 
fer grace; and that of these baptism, confirmation, 
and the order, cannot be repeated without sacrilege. 
I also receive and admit the received and approved 
ceremonies of the Catholic Church, used in the sol- 
emn administration of the aforesaid sacraments. 

I embrace and receive all and every one of the 
things which have been defined and declared in the 
Holy Council of Trent concerning original sin and 
justification. 

I profess, likewise, that in the Mass there is offered 
to God a true, proper and propitiatory sacrifice for 
the living and the dead. 

And that in the most holy sacrament of the Eu- 
charist there is truly, really, and substantially the 
body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, 
of onr Lord Jesus Christ; and that there is made, a 
conversion of the whole substance of the bread into 
the body, and of the whole substance of the wine 
into the blood; which conversion the Catholic Church 
calleth transubstantiation. 

I also confess that under either kind alone Christ 
is received whole and entire, and a true sacrament. 

I constantly hold that there is a Purgatory, and 
that the souls therein detained are helped by the 
suffrage of the faithful. 

Likewise, that the saints reigning together with 
Christ are to be honored £tnd invocated, and that thej^ 
offer prayers to God for us, and that their relics are 
to be had in veneration. 



120 ROMANISM. 

I most firmly assert that the images of Christ, of 
the Mother of God ever Virgin, and also of other 
saints, ought to be had and retained, and that due 
honor and veneration are to be given them. 

I also affirm that the power of indulgences was 
left by Christ in the church, and that the use of them 
is most wholesome to Christian people. 

I acknowledge the holy, Catholic, Apostolic 
Koman Church for the mother and mistress of all 
churches; and I promise true obedience to the Bishop 
of Eome, successor of St. Peter, Prince of the Apos- 
tles, and Vicar of Jesus Christ. 

I likewise undoubtedly receive and profess all 
other things delivered, defined, and declared by the 
sacred canons and general councils, and particularly 
by the Holy Council of Trent. 

And I condemn, reject, and anathematize all 
things contrary thereto, and all heresies which the 
church hath condemned, rejected, and anathematized. 

I, N. N., do at this present freely profess and sin- 
cerely hold this true Catholic faith, out of which no 
one can be saved; and I promise most constantly to 
retain and confess the same entire and inviolate, by 
God's assistance, to the end of my life. 

A POPISH BULL OR CTJRSE. 

PRONOUNCED ON REV. WM. HOGAN, FORMERLY A PAPAL 
PRIEST IN PHILADELPHIA. 

" By the authority of God Almighty, the Father, 
Son, and Holy Ghost, and the undefiled Virgin Mary, 
mother and patroness of our Saviour, and of all 
celestial virtues, angels, archangels, thrones, domin- 



ROMANISM, 121 

ions, powers, cherubim and seraphim, and of all the 
holy patriarch" prophets, and of all the apostles and 
evangelists, of the holy innocents, who in the sight 
of the Holy Lamb are found worthy to sing the new 
song of the holy martyrs and holy confessors, and 
of all the holy Virgins, and of all saints together 
with the holy elect of God — may he, William Hogan, 
be damned. 

We excommunicate and anathematize him from 
the threshold of the Holy Church of God Almighty. 
We sequester him, that he may be tormented, dis- 
posed and be delivered over withDathan and Abiram, 
and with those who say unto the Lord, ' Depart from 
us; we desire none of Thy ways.' As a fire is 
quenched with water, so let the light of him be put 
out forevermore, unless it shall repent him and make 
satisfaction. Amen. 

May the Father, who creates man, curse him. 
May the Son, who suffered for us, curse him. May 
the Holy Ghost, who is poured out in baptism, curse 
him. May the holy cross, which Christ for our sal- 
vation triumphing over his enemies, ascended, curse 
him. 

May the Holy Mary, ever virgin and mother of 
God, curse him. May St. Michael, the advocate of 
the Holy Souls, curse him. May all the angels, 
principalities and powers, and all heavenly armies, 
curse him. May the glorious band of the patriarchs 
and prophets curse him. 

May St. John the Precursor, and St. John the 
Baptist, and St. Peter, and St. Paul, and St. Andrew, 
and all other of Christ's apostles together, curse him, 
and may the rest of the disciples and evangelists, 



122 ROMANISM. 

who by their preaching converted the universe, and 
the holy and wonderful company of martyrs and con- 
fessors, who by their works are found pleasing to 
God Almighty. May the holy choir of the holy vir- 
gins, who for the honor of Christ have despised the 
things of the world, damn him. May all saints from 
the beginning of the world to everlasting ages, who 
are found to be beloved of God, damn him. 

May he be damned wherever he be, whether in 
the house or in the alley, in the woods or in the water, 
or in the church. 

May he be cursed in living and dying. May he 
be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, 
in being thirsty, in fasting and sleeping, in slum- 
bering and in sitting, in living, in working, in rest- 
ing, and . . . and in blood-letting. 

May he be cursed in all the faculties of his body. 
May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly. May he 
be cursed in his hair; cursed be he in his brain and 
his vortex, in his temples, in his teeth and grinders; 
in his lips, in his shoulders, in his arms, in his 
fingers. 

May he be damned in his mouth, in his breast, in 
his heart and purtenances, down to the very stomach. 
May he be cursed in his . . and his . . ; in his 
thighs, in . . , and his . . and in his knees, his 
legs, and his feet and toenails. May he be cursed in 
all his joints and articulation of the members; from 
the crown of his head to the soles of his feet may 
there be no soundness. 

May the Son of the living God, with all the glory 
of His Majesty, curse him, and may heaven, with all 
the powers that move therein, rise up against him 



ROMANISM. 123 

and curse and damn him, unless he repent and make 
satisfaction. Amen. So be it. Be it so. Amen. 

THE POPE'S PRETENSIONS. 

Some of the absurd pretensions of the popes are 
illustrated by the following titles and powers, which 
they have assumed: 

"The Father of all Fathers;" "The Chief High 
Priest and Prince of God;" "The Regent of the 
House of the Lord;" "The Oracle of Religion;" 
"Our Most Holy Lord God;" "Our Lord God the 
Pope;" "The Divine Majesty;" "The Victorious 
God and Man in the See of Rome;" "The Lamb of 
God that taketh away the sins of the world; " "The 
Bearer of Eternal Life; " " The Most Holv Father; " 
"Priest of the World;" " God's Vicar General on 
Earth;" "The Most High and Mighty God on 
Earth; " " More than God," etc. 

"Pius V., our reigning pope, is prince over all 
nations and kingdoms, and he has power to pluck 
up, scatter, plant, ruin and build." (Canon of the 
Council of Trent). 

"All mortals are judged by the pope, and the 
pope by nobody." (Lateran Canon). 

" It is necessary to salvation that all Christians 
be subject to the pope." (Pope Boniface VIII.) 

"He (the pope) alone has the right to assume 
empire. All nations must kiss his feet. His name 
is the only one to be uttered in the churches. It is 
the only name in the world. He has the right to 
depose emperors. No council can call itself general 
without the consent of the pope. No chapter, no 



i2 4 ROMANISM. 

book can be reputed canonical without his authority. 
No one can invalidate his sentence; he can abrogate 
those of all others. He cannot be judged by any. 
All persons whatsoever are forbidden to condemn 
him who is called to the apostolic chair. The 
Church of Eome is never wrong, and will never fall 
into error. Every Roman pontiff when ordained 
becomes holy." (Bull of Gregory VIL) 

" The pope is supreme over all the world, may 
impose taxes, and destroy crowns and castles for the 
preservation of Christianity." (St. Thomas Aquinas;. 

" The supremacy of the pope over all persons and 
things is the main substance of Christianity." (Bel- 
larmine.) 

" The pope has supreme power over kings and 
Christian princes; he may remove them from office, 
and in their place put others." (Brovius, De Rom. 
Pontiff, Cap. 46, p. 62.) 

" The pope is divine monarch, supreme emperor 
and king. Hence the pope is crowned with a triple 
crown, as king of heaven, of earth, and of hell. He 
is also above angels; so that if it were possible that 
angels could err from the faith, they could be judged 
and excommunicated by the pope." (Feraris in 
Papa, Art. 11, No. 10.) 

" The vicar of God, in the place of God, remits 
to man the debt of a plighted promise." (Dens, 
4, 134.) 

" The pope can do all things that he wishes to do, 
and is empowered by God to do all things that he 
himself can." (Tiba. ) 

" The pope can transubstantiate sin into duty, 
and duty into sin." (Durand.) 



ROMANISM. 



125 



" The bishop of Rome cannot even sin without 
being praised." (Muscovius.) 

" God's tribunal and the pope's tribunal are the 
same." (Muscovius.) 

" The pope is the Lord of the whole world. The 
pope has temporal power; his temporal power is 
most eminent. All other powers depend on the 
pope." (Marcinus, Jure Princep. Rom., Lib. 2, 
cap. 1, 2.) 



ROMANISM. 



THE CONFESSIONAL. 

From th "Protestant Times," September ■, 1883. 



Cursed system, hideous plan 
For demoralizing man, — 
For destroying without ruth 
All the purity of youth, 
For polluting every good 
Of that jewel, maidenhood. 
For inflaming woman's heart 
By the priest's lascivious art, 
Till each vivisected string 
Thrills beneath his torturing, — 
We denounce what we know 

well, 
Cruel masterpiece of hell. 

11. 
False religion's foulest blot, — 
Universal treason plot 
Undermining everywhere 
Each affection pure and fair; 
Woe for weakness sucked to 

death, 
Under the Confessor's breath, 
Spider-like with poisonous skill, 
Paralyzing all the will, 
While with glozing lie he claims 
Power to quench eternal flames, 
Till his victim yield to him 
Soul and body, life and dim. 

in. 
Yea: — we know how Belial's 

wile, 
Fascinating to defile, 
Fiendish, not alone bad men's, 
Lures in Liguori and Dens; 
When poor human nature 

droops 
In the slough to which it stoops, 
And is smothered in its fall 
By the lewd Confessional, — 



Where some sensual priest of 

Bel 
Lyingly absolves from hell ; 
While he tempts to further sin, 
By corrupting all within ! 

IV. 

Ay : in* bitterness we know, 
God and Man's infernal foe 
Hath his chief and crowning 

power 
In the sleek Confessor's hour, 
When the secrets of the soul 
Yielded up to his control, 
Make him deposit of his slave, 
Chained by him beyond the 

grave. 
As he boasts himself to be 
God and judge of thine and thee, 
With all powers to loose and 

bind, 
In all worlds all human kind! 



False ! — Repentance stands for- 
given — [heaven : 
Pardon shines the gift of 
Priest, with your Confessional, 
Chiniquy has told us.all; * 
By his honesty unsealed 
All your baseness is revealed! 
England! home of light and 

truth, 
Save the virgin and the youth — 
And — for in your might you 

can — 
Save the Woman and Man 
From the Dragon and the Beast, 
The Confessional, the Priest! 
— Martin F. Tupper. 
Albany ', Aug. 2, ib8 '?. 



* "The Priest, The Woman, and The Confessional," by Father Chiniquy. 
Published by Craig" & Barlow, Chicago. Price, $1.00. 



ROMANISM UNMASKED! 

The plates of this great book have been twice 
mysteriously burned. 

Endorsed by the leading Reviews, Magazines, and the 
Protestant Press oj the world. 

Its Revelations are terrible Indictments 
of Popery. 

THE GREAT BOOK OF THE CENTURY! 

Fifty Years in the 
Church of Rome, 

By FATHER CHINIQUY, 

INTRIGUES, IMPOSTURES, AND CRIMINAL 

INTRIGUES OF PRIESTS. 

ROME AND THE ASSASSINATION OF LINCOLN. 

TRULY VIVID, FASCINATING, AND TRAGIC. 

NO HISTORY LIKE IT SINCE LUTHER. 

CANNOT BE REFUTED. 



There is no book upon the Romish controversy so com- 
prehensive as this. It is a complete picture of the inner 
workings, aims and objects of Popery. It is from the ex- 
perience of a living- witness, and challenges contradiction. 
It is a large but very valuable work, and is fast becoming a 
standard authority. No lover of his country should re- 
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A handsome volume of 832 pages, printed on clear type 

on fine tinted paper. It is bound in strong cloth, 

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back. Contains two portraits (one 

representing him in priestly 

robes) of the venerable 

Author. 

SENT TO ANY ADDRESS ON RECEIPT OF PRICE, $3.50 



CHICAGO: CRAIG & BABXOW, Publishers, 
180 & 182 Monroe Street. 



Terrible, but True Revelations. 
" A Wonderful Hoote."— Press. 

THE PRIEST. THE WOMAN, 
@<THE CONFESSIONAL 

BY FATHER CHINIQUY. 



To understand the evil results which arise from 
the practice of Auricular Confession, it is neces- 
sary that the testimony of a reliable witness be 
given. Such is that of the author, who held pro- 
minent positions in the priesthood for many years, 
The book has had a mission for good, and has 
awakened a desire amongst all classes of the peo- 
ple to unearth the iniquities and abominations 
connected with this doctrine, and hold them up 
to the light of day, that wives and daughters may 
be spared the mortification which follows the sur- 
render of their modesty and self-respect in the 
Confessional, and that the people may see that 
there is but One to whom we must confess, and 
He is not a Romish priest. 

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296 pagres 8vo, with portrait of the author. 
Price, $1.00. 

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CRAIG & BARLOW, Publishers, 
180 & 182 Monroe St., Chicago. 







XL'. 




